he desire which motivated
medieval religious communities to found the first universities was rooted in a basic confidence
about the knowableness of reality, a
trust that all things to be known found
a unifying principle in the belief that
God created them. Some—Thomas
Aquinas most notably—carried this
confidence enough to engage even
the intellectual work of Jewish and
Muslim thinkers.
It is this sense of confidence about
reality that has animated Catholic
intellectual life at its best. Today,
however, some question the possibility and relevance of an intellectual tradition that calls itself Catholic.
It was during the modern period
that the Middle Ages were called
“Dark,” precisely because moderns
judged religious belief to be unscientific and therefore inconsistent
with the methods of rational inquiry.
If one cannot prove God or any of
the doctrines about God, how could
a Catholic intellectual tradition be
anything more than a myopic premodern world view?
There is an inherent paradox in the
term “Catholic” when used to describe
an intellectual tradition. On the one
hand, it is a specific term used to make
reference to a specific community of
people. Ignatius of Antioch was the
first to use the term around 110, to
describe the nascent Christian community: “Wheresoever the bishop
shall appear, there let the people be,
even as where Jesus may be, there is
the universal [katholike] Church.” On
the other hand, Ignatius sought, as do
Catholics today, to describe the Church
in a way that reflects the universal theological import of Jesus’ commission

to the disciples: “go, therefore, and
make disciples of all nations” (Matthew
28:18). The Catholic Church seeks to
be a catholic community—that is, a
community spread throughout the
world, sharing what Jesus taught for
the welfare of all people.

and Stephen A. Pope focus more
specifically on the college and university context which nurtures this
tradition. Finally, the essays by Mary
Ann Glendon, George Coyne, and
Greg Kalscheur offer specific examples of how the Catholic intellectual
tradition has informed our understand-

ing today in the areas of human
rights, the origins of the universe,
and democratic political life. Interspersed throughout these essays are
shorter reflections from a number of
thinkers, including faculty members
at Boston College.
–––

Today it is common to use the term
“Catholic” in the former, specific sense,
as a reference to a particular community and its history. To be sure, in a
world in which only one of every six
people is Catholic, and in which another one of every six is a member of
a Christian community which is not in
communion with the Catholic Church,
it seems presumptuous to suggest that
the hallmark of the Catholic Church
is universality. Yet the peculiarly theological import of catholicity is that it
suggests a kind of reaching for universality. Using the image of yeast, Walter
Ong suggests in his essay (beginning
on p. 10) that the Church is “a limitless, growing reality, destined ultimately to be present everywhere and
to affect everything, though by no
means to convert everything into
itself.” The catholicity of the thinking Church is not to be found in an
attempt to colonize human reason,
but rather in a desire to know what
is true. It was this desire which animated the original university communities, and it is this desire which
can re-animate intellectual life today.

In this issue of C21 Resources, we
have brought together essays which
explore dimensions of the Catholic
intellectual tradition as a resource for
both the Church and the world. There
are four essays (by Margaret Steinfels,
Sidney Callahan, Robert Imbelli, and
Walter Ong) that address the tradition
as a whole. Further, the essays by John
Haughey, Alan Wolfe, Michael Himes,
Alasdair McIntyre, J. Michael Miller,

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The Catholic Intellectual Tradition

C21 Resources
editor

Timothy P. Muldoon
Director, The Church in the
21st Century Center
advisory b o a rd

Progressive Print Solutions
C21 Resources is published by the
Church in the 21st Century Center
at Boston College, in partnership with
the publications from which these
articles have been selected. C21 Resources is a compilation of the best
analyses and essays on key challenges
facing the Church today. They are
published with the intent of stimulating
discussion and thought among bishops,
priests, deacons, religious, and lay
members of the Catholic community.

Keep track of lectures, panel
discussions, and all events
sponsored by The
Church in the 21st Century
Center at our Web site
www.bc.edu/church21

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by margaret steinfels

C

atholic intellectual life is central to Catholic identity. It is
fundamental to the life of the
church, big C and little c, cathedral
and congregation—to its continued
vitality and to the Church’s missions
in this culture. This is not a narrow
ecclesiastical tradition, but a broad
and infinitely useful one. Commonweal
has fostered and questioned that tradition. Our writers and readers reflect
that affection and that criticism. They
are university people and journalists,
book editors, lawyers, physicians,
scientists, politicians; they are bishops, clergy, and ordinary Catholics,
who in their daily lives practice and
depend upon the kind of thinking,
reasoning, reflection that make up the
Catholic intellectual tradition. Furthermore, this tradition is also explored
and appreciated by writers and readers who are Methodists, Episcopalians,
Orthodox as well as Catholics, and not
only Christians—Jews, secular humanists, those lapsed from every religion
known to humankind.
This tradition is carried on, pursued, criticized, developed, wrestled
with by example from many different
backgrounds. The way they think and
write, read, and reflect very frequently
rests on their education in American
Catholic colleges and universities. So
along with the preservation of knowledge, the scholarly work of retrieval,
the building up of bodies of knowledge,
and the education of the young, your
schools are central to the practice of
the Catholic intellectual life. Colleges
and universities cannot claim to be
Catholic if this tradition is not part of
its core understanding; this tradition
cannot survive if Catholic colleges and
universities do not renew it, maintain
it, nourish it, support it, and pass it on.
In the last several decades, Catholicism in the United States has become
more charismatic, more Pentecostal,
more experiential, open to both old
and new currents of spirituality and
meditation; it absorbs individualistic
and congregational attitudes from
American religion generally. But
Catholicism is also and always has
been a church with a brain, with a
mind. So as important as these new

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manifestations may be, it is essential
to the Church, to its mission in the
world, to the lives of ordinary people,
that there be a vigorous and Catholic
intellectual life. And Commonweal
can’t do everything!
Of course, the Catholic identity of
Catholic colleges and universities can
have many expressions: honoring the
founding mothers and fathers; worship
and prayer; service projects; works of
social justice like basketball and football; campus ministry; statues, medallions, and endowed lectureships; the
work of notable alum and prestigious
faculty. But all of this would be a thin

Tradition is the record
of a community’s
conversation over
time about its meaning
and direction. A living
tradition is a tradition
that can raise questions
about itself.
facade if it did not include at its core a
living experience among students and
faculty of Catholic intellectual life.
Yes, carrying on this tradition is
an enormous challenge. You have to
overcome bigotry and bias, including
especially the prejudices Catholics
themselves have against their own tradition. A Catholic intellectual is not
an oxymoron. You do not have to be
a Jesuit to be a Catholic intellectual.
Yes, Catholicism and Catholic ideas
have a checkered history. What institution, tradition, idea does not? From
Plato to Foucault, from nominalism to
deconstructionism, if human ideas have
consequences, we can be sure some of
them are bad. We have our fair share.
Many people, perhaps some of you,
consider that the Catholic intellectual
tradition is singular in its intellectual
repression and oppression, its narrow-

ness and dogmatism. Well, I say go
read a history book! Some of you may
be skeptical that the adjective Catholic
adds anything to an institution or discipline except the judicial authority of
ecclesiastical officials. I disagree. For
2,000 years, Christians have struggled
in multifarious ways with everything
from body and soul to kingship and
regicide, from usury to voluntary poverty, and today still struggle with everything from medical decision making
to political theory, from child care to
spiritual counsel, from race to gender.
It is this tradition that pressed through
the centuries—and reminds us in the
Gulf War, in Bosnia—the idea of civilian immunity. The distinction between
ordinary and extraordinary care of the
sick and the dying remains a viable one
because this tradition teaches it.
It is a deep and rich tradition; it is a
tradition worthy of our attention and
study. If this tradition does not have a
place in Catholic colleges and universities, what is that you are doing? What
tradition has a better claim?
All thinkers and thinking are based
in some tradition. A tradition is not a
browned and dried-up certificate of
deposit in the bank of knowledge, but
a locus for questioning, a framework
for ordering inquiry, a standard for preferring some sets of ideas over others;
tradition is the record of a community’s
conversation over time about its meaning and direction. A living tradition is
a tradition that can raise questions
about itself.
What am I talking about? Let me at
least sketch what I think the Catholic
intellectual tradition looks like.
“The joy and hope, the grief and
anguish of the women and men of our
time, especially those who are poor or
afflicted in any way, are the joy and
hope, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing
that is genuinely human fails to find
an echo in their hearts....Christians
cherish a feeling of deep solidarity
with the human race and its history.’’
That opening paragraph from
Gaudium et Spes speaks of our responsibility for all that is genuinely human,
for what draws the minds and hearts

of women and men. The Catholic
intellectual tradition is universal in
its breadth and its interests, that is
a notion set forth, defended, repeated,
and encouraged throughout the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in
the Modern World.
I quote the quote because there
is an odd nostalgia for something
like Neo-Scholasticism, if not NeoScholasticism itself—nostalgia for
a framework that provided the high
level of integration said to have
been the guiding light of preconciliar
Catholicism. From my post at Commonweal, I am inclined to think that
we are a long way from holding or
even recovering, at least with any
integrity, that kind of framework. In
a postpositivist, post-Enlightenment
world, no body of human knowledge
enjoys that degree of authority.
But if we do not have such an integrated system, we do have ideas, habits
of mind and heart, we have preferences
and predilections, intuitions, and practices. We have a history. As Gaudium et
Spes says, our tradition is not set against
the world. But neither is it naively accepting of every current of opinion that
washes up on the shores of a pluralistic
culture. It helps us to maintain a robust
and refreshing level of skepticism. What
do I find of value? A tradition where
reason and discourse based on reason
are honored and practiced.
Let me describe just a few of its
characteristics.
First, reason and faith are not
antagonistic or unconnected. In the
Catholic tradition we do not accept
what we believe blindly or slavishly—
we are urged to think about and to
understand what we believe. This is in
some contrast to the society in which
we live. American culture, with its
Protestant history, tends to see religion
as an expression of the individual, the
subjective, the emotional, the immediate. In public life, religion and religious
belief are confined to the realm of the
private and personal, sometimes in an
absolutist reading of the First Amendment, sometimes with the prejudice
that religious thought has nothing to
contribute. For the revivalist, faith is
a personal and private encounter. For
many in the cultural elite, as Stephen
Carter argued in The Culture of Disbelief, faith is understood as a curious
avocation, a personal hobby.

It is a loss to the whole society when
any religious group accepts that role.
In contrast, Catholics—the bishops,
but many Catholic politicians and citizens as well—have often brought a
philosophical and linguistic sophistication to public policy issues. If, for
example, laws that would permit euthanasia and assisted suicide are kept
at bay in the United States, it will be
because the bishops, Catholic institutions, nurses, doctors, lawyers, ordinary
citizens, have been willing to express
their deeply held beliefs, religious and
philosophical, in a reasoned discourse
that can build consensus across the
whole society.
A second and closely related characteristic: Catholics have a tradition
that takes philosophy and philosophical thinking seriously. This means that
from the beginning, Christianity had
to adapt systems of thought that were
alien and even contrary to its religious
beliefs and yet were crucial to its mission: that is, rendering its knowledge
of God’s presence and action in the
world in a way that would make sense
to others.
We don’t usually think of Paul of
Tarsus as a philosopher, but there he
was in the agora debating Epicureans
and Stoics, and in front of the Areopagus explaining the heretofore unknown
God. Nor did it stop there. Eusebius,
Bede, Augustine, Ambrose, Anselm,
Thomas, Catherine, Teresa, etc., right
down to our own time: American
Catholic colleges and universities in
the years after World War II were often
the home to diverse philosophical
schools—phenomenology, existentialism, Hegelianism, liberalism, pragmatism, and Thomism—at a time when
secular schools prided themselves on
a univocal voice in their philosophy
departments. The sometimes imperfect
hospitality in our tradition expresses the
conviction that a disciplined mind and
systematic thought can help discern
important things about what is real.
A third characteristic: Our tradition
challenges the belief that facts come
in pristine form—no baggage; no assumptions, no preconditions, no ends,
no language that fills it with meaning.
Our culture likes to treat facts as a given,
as autonomous, unadorned objective
realities; but a fact is an abstraction
from something thicker and deeper
containing implicit ends, whether or
not the researcher, commentator, or

scholar acknowledges them. There are
virtually no value-free facts, from the
construction of public opinion polls to
descriptions of brain synapses or histories of the decision to drop the bomb
on Hiroshima. The Catholic tradition
reminds us that the fact/value distinction is practically a nil one, although
our tradition is tempted sometimes to
think there can be fact-free values.
Nonetheless, in our tradition epistemology and ethics are always interrelated. So, for example, the notion
that education can be a value-neutral
process in which teachers simply convey
facts and the students simply receive
them, in which behavior is neither
right nor wrong but a matter of personal choice, in which judgments are
neither better nor worse but simply
someone’s opinion, is nonsense, as the
condition of so many schools grimly
illustrates. This same analysis could be
applied to psychotherapy, opinion polling, political analyses, medical decision
making, etc.
This brings me to a fourth and last
point: It is a characteristic of our tradition, at its best, to resist reductionism; it does not collapse categories.
Faith and reason are compatible but
not equivalent. Our tradition rejects
fundamentalistic readings of Scripture;
the human person is neither radically
individualistic nor socially determined.
Empirical findings are not solely determinative of who we are and what we
do. Yes, absolutely: Findings in psychology, sociology, anthropology,
history, neurobiology enrich our understanding of the human person and the
human project, but they do not exhaust
that meaning or determine that trajectory. We are neurons and neuroses, but
not only neurons and neuroses; neither
DNA or TGIF fully determine who we
are or what we will do this weekend.
There is space for grace and free will,
thought, conscience, choice.
Time flies, and the list goes on:
Symbolism is taken seriously; so is analogical reasoning; images provide us
with alternative ways of knowing. All
of these are implanted in minds and
hearts by our sacramental and liturgical
practices. Our tradition takes mysticism seriously, so we know that ordinary everyday consciousness is not the
last word about reality. The practice of
caring for the poor and thinking about
caring for them shapes political philosophy and social theory. The struggle

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everywhere to link faith and culture
blesses us with an abundance of fictional
worlds from Shusaku Endo’s Deep
River to Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna.
To sum up: Yes, these characteristics
can be found in other traditions. Yes,
the Catholic tradition has been untrue
to them at times or embraced them
only kicking and screaming; but finally
they have been embraced because our
tradition becomes part of the culture
in which it finds itself—it must become
part of the culture intellectually as in
all other ways. Why? Because of its mission to transform the world, as we
read in Gaudium et Spes (No. 40): The
church, a visible organization and a
spiritual community, “travels the same
journey as all humankind and shares
the same earthly lot with the world; it
is to be a leaven and, as it were, the
soul of human society in its renewal
by Christ and transformation into the
family of God.”
Today in our culture, where the
commodification of human life, human relationships, body parts goes
on everywhere, that engagement, that
mission, means keeping the human
person at the center of our inquiry.
The human person must be seen in
his or her social context, where an
implicit and shared understanding of
the good can be found and expressed.
All of this is deeply congruent with
a religious tradition that is incarnational and sacramental, that keeps
before us the idea of a God who acts
in history on our behalf, a God who
sent Jesus, who lived among us, who
taught, who died for us, who rose from
the dead and is present in the eucharist. We are to love the Lord and love
one another as he has loved us.
And there’s the rub and that’s the
challenge. Catholic higher education,
Catholic identity, Catholic intellectual life, the Catholic Church and its
work in the world must finally be the
work of a community of believers. In
our culture that is a suspect category,
nowhere more so than in the university.
Margaret Steinfels is the past editor
of Commonweal, and currently serves as
co-director of the Center on Religion
and Culture at Fordham University.
Reprinted with permission from Origins:
CNS Documentary Service, August 24, 1994.

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Getting Our Heads Together
by sidney callahan

T

oday there exists very little
activity that can be described
with the exclusive term
“American Catholic intellectual life.”
Educated Catholics have been assimilated into the larger culture and now
find themselves subject to the same
general social conditions that militate against all varieties of intellectual
life in this country. Within the Catholic
community there are other forces that
further impede intellectual dialogue.
Our present situation, in my view,
represents a decline from the level
of recent previous decades. But mere
nostalgia will not restore the intellectual and spiritual liveliness of a simpler time, with its clear-cut verities. If
Catholics are to fashion new creative
strategies, we must first come to terms
with current social realities.
When I use the term “intellectual
life,” I mean something broader than
narrowly focused academic scholarship, or highly specialized scientific
work, or the current state of education
in colleges and universities. Intellectual life arises from the broad-ranging
activity of reading, discussing, and
responding to ideas and arguments
devoted to the meaning of events, the
interpretation of human experience.
Intellectuals, as opposed to pure
scholars, pure scientists, practicing
professionals, or social activists,
are engaged in reflective cognitive
wrestling with contrasting ideas,
current controversies, and opposing
world views.

Intellectuals may also be scholars,
professionals, artists, or activists, but
when operating as intellectuals they
are constructing and reconstructing
their culture’s paradigms or cultural
maps. Within a society, the intellectuals are those thinkers making the
maps and discussing the proper rules
for making maps, rather than the people doing the detailed specialized
drawings emerging in the research of
lab, library, or the field. Intellectuals
are neither purely scholars nor purely
hands-on activists. Rather than engage in hand-to-hand combat at the
barricades, or in the courtroom, or
in the missions, intellectuals shape
the course of activism and give general directions to the professions; they
are one step removed from the battle,
reflecting on the whys and wherefores
of the war.
As the intelligence service of
society, intellectuals have to be generalists geared to taking a larger
perspective, constantly scanning the
theoretical weather, the changing terrain, and the movements of different
bodies of troops. In other words, intellectuals have to be able to raise
their heads from their own narrowly
focused projects (and from their own
careers) and think critically about
what they see. The writers among
them then persuasively communicate
ideas to others in nontechnical language that everyone can understand,
i.e., English. English is the lingua
franca of the interdisciplinary intellectual life, bridging the jargon of the
two-and-twenty cultures of the day.

thomas aquinas:
It was necessary for human salvation that there should be a knowledge
revealed by God besides philosophical science built up by human reason.
From Summa Theologica I, 1.11
This doctrine is wisdom above all human wisdom; not merely in any
one order, but absolutely. For since it is the part of a wise person to
arrange and to judge, and since lesser matters should be judged in the
light of some higher principle, one is said to be wise in any one order
who considers the highest principle in that order: thus in the order of
building, the one who plans the form of the house is called wise and
architect, in opposition to the inferior laborers who trim the wood and
make ready the stones: “As a wise architect, I have laid the foundation”.
From Summa Theologica I, 1.6

Bridging the gaps between cultures,
bringing news of the currents in a
society to its members are important
activities. While intellectuals have
come in for a lot of scorn and contempt over the course of history, especially in America, they are nowhere
more hated and persecuted than in
totalitarian regimes. Intellectuals and
the intellectual life seek just that general level of applied truth and relevant meaning that can question the
status quo and all its operations. Detailed analyses are by nature too specific to cause trouble. No matter how
many papers Freud published in the
scholarly medical journals, he could
never have changed the map of the
modem world but for his masterly
prose and large syntheses of ideas.
In the current organization of work
and professional life, narrow specialization and enormous expenditures of
time are required and rewarded. Along
with the competitive crowding there
has been an information explosion.
Everywhere we see a marked increase
in the complexity and specialization
of jobs so that the ordinary workload,
in both the hours required and the
imposed pace of work, is heavier than
before. In academia and other professions, we see for the first time in history an affluent educated elite who
follow slave-labor schedules and endure increasing stress from competition and overwork. These conditions
are legitimated by a cult of productivity and ambition, and are imposed
upon all aspiring candidates, who, in a
tight labor market, have been fairly
desperate to succeed.
Typically, in academia, requirements
for publication, teaching, research, and
service are simultaneously increased
and enforced by financially pressured
institutions. Only highly specialized
research published in scholarly refereed journals will count toward more
and more exacting standards for
promotion and tenure decisions. The
resulting pressure for turning out
scholarly publications means that most
intellectual energy is directed toward
highly focused projects, which only a
small group of other scholars can read
with profit.
With the increase of educated per-

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sons in larger and larger corporations,
professions, and educational institutions, we find a proliferation of worlds
within worlds. There is more and
more specialization as size, dispersal,
and relocations of educated populations transform social groupings.
There are more and more publications,
but they are increasingly targeted for
professional, scholarly, or recreational
reading. Fewer general journals and
magazines exist in which serious intellectual ideas can be publicly discussed.
Politics as the common serious concern
of all public citizens has become discredited by rampant corruption, political scandals, and recent campaigns
designed for the media. The growth
of television has made serious inroads
on the written forms of communication. A great deal of general intellectual writing used to convey general ideas
of importance to a similarly educated
population, who shared common cultural concerns despite their different
occupations, and who had enough
leisure to converse.
Leisure has disappeared from American society. Since leisure is the basis
of culture and one of the cornerstones
of the intellectual life, we suffer cultural deprivation in the midst of material plenty. Even if there were more
common forums and publications,
would the harassed, overworked masses
of educated Americans have time to
read and reflect on them? It takes psychological energy to think and focus
attention; it is tempting to skip those
expenditures of energy that are not
immediately necessary for survival—
those things that are not “in my field.”
Only fairly leisured persons can partake of the high form of cultural play
that makes up the intellectual life.
Our educated classes are working extremely hard at work—and working
equally hard at home.
Family life has changed. Servants
have disappeared, the extended family
is no longer a practical support, and
women have gone to work and may
pursue their own demanding careers.
The leisure that Oxford dons once
enjoyed was built upon the backs
of various submerged and exploited
populations—the servant classes, the
toiling natives of the Empire, and
women. Women, even educated,

privileged women, have always done
the “shadow work” of family, household, and culture, the maintenance
work that made intellectual leisure
possible for an elite group of males.
Among lay Catholics who became
educated in large numbers after World
War II, the sense of vocation or calling
once limited to the religious orders
was taken up with enthusiasm. Many
men did not feel called to be priests
but were eager to be professors. A
great deal of idealism was felt by
those laypersons called to intellectual
work: One studies and seeks truth for
the greater glory of God; one writes
and teaches and professes to further
the Kingdom, out there in the university and the real world, rather than in
the monastery.
In that first flowering in the forties
and fifties it would be appropriate to
speak of the American Catholic intellectual community as fairly cohesive
and homogeneous. It was a very small
group, its liberal wing sometimes
labeled “Commonweal Catholics.” In
those days, the relatively small number
of educated Catholics who were engaged in an intellectual life would all
know one another, read one another’s
books and articles, and share a common faith and education. Insight into
the spirit of this earlier era can be had
by reading Wilfrid Sheed’s account of
his parents, Frank and Maisie.
Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward were
a force unto themselves, who through
publishing and frenetic lecturing single-handedly engendered much of preVatican II intellectual life in Catholic
America. They also lived their faith in
an exemplary style, as did other influential Catholic writers such as Dorothy
Day. Other memoirs of those years
among Catholic intellectuals can be
found in the writings of Raissa Maritain, Abigail McCarthy, Christopher
Dawson, and Richard Oilman. Prominent intellectual converts were received
into the Church, and when they
became Catholics they joined a welldefined faith, clearly demarcated,
with its own distinct intellectual community. There were various circles
and centers, and various publication
ventures in the East and Midwest,
Fordham, Georgetown, Chicago, St.
John’s, Notre Dame, Boston. Educated
Catholics gathered in enclaves to
study and discuss their faith; they
were trying to integrate their faith

with the intellectual currents of the
day. Much energy was also spent on
matters of internal church reform
and liturgical renewal—an endeavor
which was confirmed by the calling
of Vatican II and its surprisingly
dramatic unfolding.
Such gatherings of Catholic intellectuals for study and mutual support
were necessary because in general the
intellectual and professional worlds of
the time were fairly hostile to Catholics.
Persecution, as it always does, engendered high morale, cohesion, and loyalty among those who did not fall away
under the pressure. The forties and
fifties were times in academia when
doctrinaire secular atheism inherited
from the Enlightenment reigned supreme. All religion was a remnant of
superstition and Catholicism was the
very worst of all. As one secular savant
accurately noted, “anti-Catholicism was
the anti-Semitism of the intellectuals.”

providence and poverty (Franciscan)
with the liturgical movement’s revival
(Benedictine). Many intellectual
Catholics were attempting to live by
a radically different sexual ethic, sans
artificial birth control, aspiring to ideals
of love and sacrifice through having
large families. Women were exhorted
to live out a particular ideal of the
valiant woman, which could not easily
encompass career aspirations. The ban
on artificial contraception produced
intense pressures among educated
Catholics, caught in contradictory
aspirations—the solitude of the study
versus the active labor of domesticity.
Looking back on that period in
American Catholic intellectual life, I
can see that the atmosphere of the
community was charged with a great
deal of sublimated erotic energy. Allan
Bloom mentions that the sexual restraints of an earlier generation of students lent a romantic or erotic edge

The crying need of educated Catholics is for
sustained intellectual grappling with the
challenge of integrating Christianity with their
work and their worlds of secular thinking.
The crudest misunderstandings and
antipathies could be encountered in Ivy
League establishment circles, whose
members were rigid in their own certainties that either Freud, or David
Hume, or science had settled the
God question forever. The ecumenical
movement was also in its infancy, so
Catholics were subjected to suspicion,
bias, and subtle pressures from their
Protestant neighbors, as well as from
the secular world. The prejudice and
scorn that Catholics could meet, say in
the Harvard philosophy department,
would seem quaint today.

to higher education that heightened
the life of learning. I found this point
intriguing, because I think there was an
erotic intensity informing the atmosphere of postwar educated Catholic
life. A heightened existential erotic style
of faith was idealized: it could be found
in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
and Graham Greene novels, and still
can be seen today in Walker Percy’s
writings or John Paul II’s discourses on
love and sex. Catholics were clearly different from others in their faith, in
their thinking, and in their chastity,
sexual practices and commitments.

During this period, many educated,
married Catholics were also unassimilated to the mainstream in their sexual
manners and mores. They were not
only attempting to live new forms
of the ancient intellectual vocations
(Dominican, Jesuit), but also to practice distinctive spiritual ideals in their
family lives. Here again there was an
attempt to integrate the influence of the
Catholic Worker movement’s stress on

When all went well with these firstor second-generation of educated lay
Catholic intellectuals, things went
very well indeed. The commitment
and integration of living a vocation
to the intellectual life that combined
abstract thought with intense liturgical practice, with erotic energy and
intense family commitments—in the
midst of social persecutions—produced
an esprit de corps and an exciting sense

of bonded community. Dorothy
Day’s work, along with that of the
worker priests and Young Christian
Workers, had been influential in persuading Catholic intellectuals that
they must be committed to social justice and live a simple life devoted to
sacrifice and love. Intellectual Catholics
knew who they were, and what they
were about. Their vocation was to
fight the good fight, seek truth, and
persevere in social reform efforts inside and outside the Catholic Church.
They could talk and argue with one
another, but stayed united in order to
gain support for the struggle with a
sometimes hostile world. Literature,
philosophy, and above all politics were
considered fertile fields for combining
religious commitment and intellectual
work. Passion and ideology were united.
What can be done now? Perhaps a
two-pronged effort could be envisioned.
One is a decentered, self-reliant, do-ityourself, till-your-own-gardens strategy.
At the same time, a larger campaign
might be mounted to move Catholic
institutions toward different goals that
would address the cultural problems
of overload, over-specialization, underformation, and isolation of so many
educated Catholics. A combination
of a bottom-up, base-community approach and a top-down, institutional
tactic might make some headway.
I know less about the larger institutional approaches but I can at least
imagine what might be done from what
I have observed of creative efforts at
some Catholic colleges and archdiocesan programs. Catholic colleges might
start to fight back against the overspecialization of academia by starting
interdisciplinary institutes and more
public programs devoted to topics
which meet the problems of Catholics
in secular culture. Many programs
I have attended—for instance on the
family, on death and dying, on aging, on
computer technologies, or the changing church—have brought in Catholic
professionals from the local community
to meet with the students, faculty, a
guest speaker.
Such interdisciplinary intellectual
endeavors have often been funded by
grants from outside the institutions,
such as the state councils on the humanities or corporations. These efforts
have also often been the brainchild of
some creative retired religious sister
on the faculty who no longer has to
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Getting Our Heads Together
Continued from Page 5

fight for tenure with constant publishing to update her curriculum vitae. If
Catholic educational institutions truly
want to encourage the intellectual life
as a search for integrated truth, they
will have to provide institutional supports and rewards that can compete
with the rewards offered by academic
grants for narrow specialization and
value-free inquiry.
If other institutions in the Church
wish to further the intellectual life,
the world of Catholic adult education
awaits. Individual parishes may not
have the resources to go it alone, but
dioceses, seminaries, centers for spirituality, retreat houses, and other institutes and organizations can provide
programs to stimulate the intellectual
life. These would have to be broader
than courses in Scripture or theology,
or studies of the mystics, spirituality,
and prayer. The present great revival
of spirituality, complete with institutes
and publications devoted to spiritual

practices, presents a model for an intellectual revival. Spiritual institutes
and retreats teach centering prayer
and integration of self. But today’s
Catholics also need centered, integrated thinking. The crying need of
educated Catholics is for sustained intellectual grappling with the challenge
of integrating Christianity with their
work and their worlds of secular thinking. Perhaps a national Catholic great
books course or a university of the air
as in Great Britain could spark such a
movement. Perhaps the USCCB, or
the Paulists, or the Jesuits, or even the
Knights and Daughters might fund a
prime-time Bill Moyers-type series of
intellectual Catholic conversations on
TV to begin the great revival. A project looking to intellectual renaissance
could be sponsored in cooperation
with Catholic educational institutions
and Catholic magazines. Every intellectual Catholic magazine should be
working to get its networks of readers
together for more sustained inquiry—

and thereby ensure a future readership.
Many have noted that the secular
liberal establishment is crumbling in
its old certainties. What has been
called liberalism’s “thin theory of the
good” is breaking down. Catholicism,
with its avowal of a more communitarian social justice ethic and its fullbodied view of human nature, has
something to offer tired blood and
anemic individualism. This may
be “the truly Catholic moment” in
America. Or perhaps we should say
the time is ripe for many different
Catholic moments, since the intellectuals in the church, being argumentative,
are not speaking with one party line.
But the larger culture may be ready to
listen to diverse streams of the Catholic
tradition in new ways. Our intellectual
task is to work harder at understanding
how the good news we offer relates to
other quests for knowledge. All we
want in the end, of course, is to enlist
the hearts and minds of all humanity
in a mutual seeking of love, peace, justice, and truth. Americans are born
utopians: The impossible only takes
a little longer.

pope john paul ii, from the encyclical faith and reason (1998)
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has
placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving
God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
In both East and West, we may trace a journey which has led humanity down the centuries to meet and engage truth
more and more deeply. It is a journey which has unfolded—as it must—within the horizon of personal self-consciousness: the more human beings know reality and the world, the more they know themselves in their uniqueness, with the
question of the meaning of things and of their very existence becoming ever more pressing. This is why all that is the
object of our knowledge becomes a part of our life. The admonition “Know yourself” was carved on the temple portal
at Delphi, as testimony to a basic truth to be adopted as a minimal norm by those who seek to set themselves apart from
the rest of creation as “human beings,” that is as those who “know themselves.”
Moreover, a cursory glance at ancient history shows clearly how in different parts of the world, with their different
cultures, there arise at the same time the fundamental questions which pervade human life: Who am I? Where have I
come from and where am I going? Why is there evil? What is there after this life? These are the questions which we
find in the sacred writings of Israel, as also in the Veda and the Avesta; we find them in the writings of Confucius and
Lao-Tze, and in the preaching of Tirthankara and Buddha; they appear in the poetry of Homer and in the tragedies of
Euripides and Sophocles, as they do in the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle. They are questions which have
their common source in the quest for meaning which has always compelled the human heart. In fact, the answer given
to these questions decides the direction which people seek to give to their lives.
The Church is no stranger to this journey of discovery, nor could she ever be. From the moment when, through
the Paschal Mystery, she received the gift of the ultimate truth about human life, the Church has made her pilgrim
way along the paths of the world to proclaim that Jesus Christ is “the way, and the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6). It is
her duty to serve humanity in different ways, but one way in particular imposes a responsibility of a quite special
kind: the diakonia service of the truth. This mission on the one hand makes the believing community a partner in
humanity’s shared struggle to arrive at truth; and on the other hand it obliges the believing community to proclaim the
certitudes arrived at, albeit with a sense that every truth attained is but a step towards that fullness of truth which will
appear with the final Revelation of God: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part;
then I shall understand fully” (1 Cor 13:12).

Sidney Callahan held the Paul J. McKeever
Chair of Moral Theology, St. John's University,
Queens, NY in 2002-2003 and she was a Professor of Psychology at Mercy College from 19801997.
Reprinted with permission of the publishers from
Commonweal, 17 November 1989.

–––

What Is the Catholic
Intellectual Tradition?
by rosanna f. demarco

A

t the center of my education
as a graduate student at Boston
College and now as a faculty
member in the Connell School of Nursing is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.
I characterize a Catholic intellectual
tradition as rigorous scholarship based
in 1) a reflective spirit of inquiry, 2) ethical values, and 3) knowledge developed
and shared with my students so they may
continue a circle of engaged service to
others. My clinical specialty is community/public health nursing science. By
the nature of this concentration it is very
easy for me to contemplate and reflect
on persons’ lives in their neighborhoods
and how their living and wellness intersects with dreams and realities. It is here
where I work with women living with
HIV and AIDS. Many of the women I
have come to know live in the inner city
of Boston. They are poor and have had
lives that have empowered and disempowered them and their families
cyclically. I have learned that creating
culturally relevant and gender sensitive
prevention education, measuring its
efficacy, and engaging my students in
service through this process is the way
to translate these women’s voices into
health interventions that are meaningful.
My research questions, the conduct of
the process, and the answers I find are
the ways I can encourage and excite
nursing students in class and clinical settings to not just care for individuals but
to strive for something more profound:
the common good. It is precisely this
notion of the common good that I
believe is how learning from a neighborhood can help us shape a neighborhood
and our own lives. It is here I hope my
students lay cornerstones of what I see
as the evolving Catholic Intellectual
Traditions to come in nursing science.
Rosanna F. DeMarco is an Associate Professor in
the Connell School of Nursing at Boston College.

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Stewards of the Tradition
Christ the Center
by robert p. imbelli

T

he rubric under which this
evening’s presentation is
placed is “Stewards of the
Tradition.” My own contribution will
be to focus our attention upon what
I consider to be the very heart and
center of the Catholic intellectual (or,
as I prefer, “wisdom”) tradition: the
Lord Jesus Christ himself. My presentation will be in three parts. First, I
will consider the notion of tradition
and defend the claim that Jesus Christ
is indeed the living center of the tradition. Second, I will suggest that the
“crisis” of the Catholic intellectual
tradition is, at its most profound, a
Christological crisis. Third, I will hazard some suggestions regarding the
context of the Catholic college and
university and the challenge of reaffirming the Christic center. Because
of limitations of time, all this will be
done briefly, but, I hope, in a way suggestive of further development.
The Christic Center of Tradition
In considering “tradition,” I find it
helpful to distinguish three interconnected senses of the word. Prior to
Vatican II when Catholics spoke of
“tradition” they most commonly intended the tradita: those things that
had been handed down, whether Scripture, creeds, or catechetical formulations. These tradita, often referred
to as the “deposit of faith,” were presumed to be the venerable Latin of
the Triedentine Mass and the texts of
Denzinger.
A second sense of “tradition,” come
newly to the fore since Vatican II, is
that of traditio. Here, tradition indicates
less what has been handed down than
the very process of handing down, of
“traditioning” (as is sometimes said):
the ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation of the past into the present.
Here the center of concern is the
present and the future; and one often
encounters the language of “accommodation” and “inculturation.”
But I would suggest a third sense of
tradition, less frequently invoked, yet
foundational to the previous legitimate

uses. I refer to this by the Latin designation, Traditus. Here, tradition is the
One who is handed down, Jesus Christ
himself as the living heart and center
of Christian tradition. Thus when we
speak of “Stewards of the Tradition,”
at its theologically most profound level
we are speaking of our institutions and
ourselves as bearers of the multiple
riches of the mystery of Christ.
Now this Catholic wisdom tradition, in all three senses, but especially
the third, comes to privileged expression in the Eucharistic liturgy. Here,
the Real Presence of Christ is proclaimed and enacted. I concur, then,
with authors like Ida and Kavanaugh
and Catherine LaCugna who speak
of liturgy as theologia prima, the living theology which nourishes and
sustains our second order reflection.
Liturgy is the primary bearer of tradition, because here, in sacramental
fullness, Jesus “hands himself over”
for the life of the world.

appeals to terms such as “sacramental
consciousness” and “incarnational sensibility” (more often than not accompanied by a well-known line from the
Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“The world is charged with the
grandeur of God”). Now, I do not dispute the validity of these claims, or
the beauty of the verse. But I maintain
that unless this widespread appeal is
explicitly founded upon the confession
of the unique Incarnation in Jesus
Christ, who is thereby the Sacrament
of encounter with God, we will lack
the one sure foundation for renewal
and transformation, both personal
and institutional.

by a misguided ecumenism that seeks
not to cause offense. But its outcome
is the invocation of a “generic brands”
deity that only exists in an abstract
realm, uninhabited by any living tradition. Have we not unfortunately heard
such anodyne invocations in faculty
convocations and commencements
even in Catholic colleges?1
Moreover, do not such vague and
nondescript generalizations seep all
too readily into our attempts to articulate the vision and mission of our
institutions of higher education? So,
to choose an example with which I
am most familiar, one hears repeated,
in almost mantra-like fashion, that the
aim of education in the Jesuit tradition
is “to educate men and women for
others.” Undoubtedly, an admirable
sentiment; but one not at all distinctive to Jesuit colleges and universities.
Indeed, its incantation risks carrying
an undertone of smugness regarding
other institutions’ purposes.

In sum, reading and listening to
statements of vision and mission, I
often feel as St. Augustine did in his
Confessions. Augustine gratefully benefitted from the writings of the Platonists he had read, but failed to find there
the one salvific name he longed for:
that of Jesus Christ.3 What Ignatius
and Hopkins and Arrupe took for
granted, we must learn to appropriate
and articulate anew.

Here, tradition is the One who is handed
down, Jesus Christ himself as the living heart
and center of Christian tradition.
The Crisis of Tradition
With such testimony by distinguished witnesses, it would seem that
the tradition’s center is secure. Yet, if
the Catholic mind or intellectual tradition is in a state of acute crisis today, I
would suggest that a key dimension of
that crisis is the loss of a robust Christic
center. Obviously, here too I can only
signal some signs of the times pointing
to what I discern to be a Christological
amnesia and neglect in some quarters
of contemporary Catholicism.
For a number of years now, I have
noted in theological writings, both
scholarly and popular, what I call a
“unitarianism of the Spirit.”As the
term implies, these authors tend to
speak almost uniquely of God in terms
of “Holy Spirit,” neglecting the traditional language of “Father” and “Son.”
Sometimes this development is fueled

Renewing the Christic Center
Having reviewed some signs of
Christological forgetfulness, let me
pass on to signs of promise, hopeful
indications of Christological renewal.

Now the phrase “men and women
for others” is culled from an address
by the then-Father General of the
Society of Jesus, Pedro Arrupe. What
I find intriguing is that even in official
digests of his talk one rarely finds the
full expression of Arrupe’s thought on
the matter. Here is the key sentence:
“Today our prime educational objective must be to form men and women
for others; men and women who will
not live for themselves but for God
and his Christ—for the God man who
lived and died for all the world...”2
There is a striking Christocentrism to
Arrupe’s vision that is faithful to the
Ignatian tradition and that one sorely
misses in the reductionist and abbreviated versions too often transmitted.

I would first point to the theological work of Frans Jozef van Beeck,
S.J., who is a participant in our
conference. Father van Beeck is the
author of a multivolume work on
Catholic systematic theology entitled
God Encountered, that, when complete,
will be a milestone in American
Catholic theology. In a preliminary
programmatic essay toward his magnum opus, van Beeck summed up its
guiding vision of renewal in theology
and pastoral practice in these words:
“This renewal, if it is to be authentically Christian, must go back to the
original and abiding realization that
Christ is alive and present in the Spirit,
a realization found everywhere in the
New Testament and one that remains
the original source of all Christian
faith and identity experience.”4

Finally, when pressed to characterize
what is distinctive about the Catholic
vision and the Catholic intellectual
tradition, one frequently encounters

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Stewards of the Tradition
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With regard to the distinctive vocation of Catholic colleges and universities, this “abiding realization,” that
the living Christ is the heart of the
Catholic wisdom tradition, must
inspire and direct more than our theological offerings and ministerial programs, important as these undoubtedly
are. It also holds implications for mission statements and curriculum decisions; for environment and art; for
class size, administrative policies, and,
yes, for hiring.5 Passing from a merely
notional apprehension to a real apprehension of these matters (to use Cardinal Newman’s categories) will require
imaginative and discerning leadership
and commitment. But so has every
authentic renewal in the Church.
For Newman, the mind’s passage
from the notional to the real is mediated by the imagination that allows the
mind to engage and energize the heart.
And poetry is a prime vehicle for this
heart-felt enfleshment of the word.
Another sign of hope, then, arises from
the recent study by Peggy Rosenthal,
The Poets’ Jesus. Reminiscent of my earlier cautions regarding “incarnationalism without Incarnation,” Rosenthal
writes, “Even for many practicing
Christians, the late-twentieth century’s
strong spirituality of incarnational presence was linked only weakly to the nave
and person of Jesus.6” But in the last
chapter of her work, entitled “Jesus
Present,” she discusses a number of
contemporary American poets, like
Andrew Hudgins, Scott Cairns, Denise
Levertov, and Vassar Miller. Her analysis of their common ground is noteworthy: “They seem, at the end of
two millennia in which this central
figure of Christianity [Jesus Christ] has
been reshaped and reconfigured, very
comfortable with the orthodox configurations yet energized by what they
mean for human life at this moment.”7
Indeed, Denise Levertov’s persuasion is
particularly radical: “The miracle of
God assuming flesh in the Incarna-

tion, and continuing to become the
‘bread of life’ in the Eucharist, informs
her faith in the very possibility and
meaning of metaphor.”8 Only Real
Presence is able to ground and guarantee real presences.
One final sign of Christological hope
bears mentioning. Over the past ten
years, a number of graduate students
in theology seem to be moving beyond
the shop-worn labels of “liberal” or
“conservative” to a new engagement
with the tradition. Often they sense
that they were deprived, through faulty
religious education, of life-giving roots.
Hence they undertake an in-depth
study of the patristic or scholastic traditions for their doctoral dissertations.
This is resourcement, return to the
sources, not for the sake of nostalgia,
but for the sake of authentic aggiornamento that is more than mere cultural
accommodation. They are captivated
by Christ, the Traditus; and hence
they diligently search the tradita for
signs of the Beloved to whom we
must bear witness in the present, the
“today” of faith.
I quote one young Catholic theologian who speaks for many: Let us
leave liberal/conservative behind us.
And let us leave behind us, too, that
Catholicism which had allowed its
distinctive colors to bleed into beige.
“Let us embrace the spicy, troublesome, fascinating, and culture-transforming person of Jesus Christ and
let him shape our experience and
our world.”9
Then, I am convinced, we shall discover anew that ex corde ecclesiae is ever
ex corde Christi.10
Endnotes
1 At a rather more elevated theological level, I
suggest that concern about the spread of this
“unitarianism of the Spirit” underlies the controversial Declaration of the Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus.

catherine of siena:
Then, dearest son, open the eye of thine intellect in the light of
most holy faith, and behold how much thou art beloved of God.
Letter to Neri Di
Landoccio Dei Pagliaresi

Truth is the object of Knowledge of whatever kind; and when
we inquire what is meant by Truth,
I suppose it is right to answer that
Truth means facts and their relations, which stand toward each
other pretty much as subjects and
predicates in logic. All that exists,
as contemplated by the human
mind, forms one large system or
complex fact, and this of course
resolves itself into an indefinite
number of particular facts, which,
as being portions of a whole, have
countless relations of every kind,
one toward another. Knowledge
is the apprehension of these facts,
whether in themselves, or in their
mutual positions and bearings.
And, as all taken together form one
integral subject for contemplation,
so there are no natural or real limits between part and part; one is
ever running into another; all, as
viewed by the mind, are combined
together, and possess a correlative
character one with another, from
the internal mysteries of the Divine
Essence down to our own sensations and consciousness, from the
most solemn appointments of the
Lord of all down to what may be
called the accident of the hour, from
the most glorious seraph down to the
vilest and most noxious of reptiles.

he first Christians—drawn
together by their faith in the
significance of the life, death,
and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth—
were members of Jewish communities
embedded in a Roman political system
and in a linguistic and intellectual culture that was largely Greek in origin.
As the Christian “way” moved beyond
these Jewish communities, attracted
Gentile converts, and spread, a Christian intellectual tradition or, better, a
constellation of traditions developed in
the diverse regions where Christian
faith took root—theologies, philosophies, artistic currents, systems of legal
thought and political theory, which
were the product of a continuous dialogue between faith and cultures. With
the fragmentation of the Christian
churches, especially in the 15th and

16th centuries, the Catholic intellectual tradition in the West developed
its own characteristics. Since the
medieval period, one of its principal
venues has been the university. This
dialogue between faith and culture
reflects two essential characteristics
of the Christian, and especially the
Catholic, understanding of human
experience: that faith necessarily seeks
understanding, and that all intellectual
inquiry leads eventually to questions
of ultimacy that invite faith responses.
The Catholic view sees no conflict
between faith and knowledge; it looks
to how they illuminate each other.
Boston College as a Catholic and Jesuit University,
Boston College assessment and planning report,
July 2006.
—

From Tolerance to Engagement
in Catholic Higher Education
by john c. haughey, s.j.
On February 3, Woodstock fellow John
Haughey, S.J., received the second annual
Monika K. Hellwig Award from the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities
for “outstanding contributions to Catholic
intellectual life.” He delivered the following
remarks to the presidents of Catholic colleges
and universities, gathered for that occasion.

T

he 220 Catholic higher education institutions in this
country are doing an extraordinary thing. But I wonder whether
their leaders have thought about the
potential their work has for the future
self-understanding of Roman Catholicism itself. These institutions host a
bewildering number of pluralisms—
academic, ethnic, religious, racial, economic—and do so in a way that has
made a home for many voices and values and traditions and bodies of knowledge. But the hospitality accorded by
these institutions has not been sufficiently attentive to their uniqueness
or opportunistic about this pluralism.
It is not that they have been indifferent
to or fallen short of fidelity to the
Church’s teachings, it seems to me. It
is, rather, in not engaging these pluralisms. A hospitality that simply makes
room for otherness is not the same as
a hospitality that engages and enables
it in all its forms to be self-critical.
But an engaged hospitality could also
equip the Catholic faith, the faith that
sponsors your institutions, to learn to
be critical of itself. Roman Catholicism
is as credible as a teaching church as
it shows itself a learning church.
A hospitality which makes room for
the other, and which houses and credentials the other, and does not engage
that otherness is a deficient host. A
deficient hospitality, which I would call
a hospitality of tolerance, shortchanges
the students, the school, and all the cultures your personnel come from, but
most of all the Church. A hospitality
of tolerance, in a word, avoids, and is
shrewd in doing so. It “lets sleeping
dogs lie”; it lets “a thousand flowers
bloom”; it lets the whole weight of
taking responsibility for the Catholicism of the campus come to rest on
the campus ministry. The fruit of this

avoidance is a campus that loses touch
with its roots in the Catholic intellectual
tradition. That tradition, then, becomes
a “was” as modernism, postmodernism,
and post-postmodernism, and every
here-today-gone-tomorrow “tradition”
becomes the new “is.”
But I want to be even more surgically
clear about what I am saying. When the
disciplines are engaged by the Catholic
intellectual tradition, they have much
to teach their interlocutors and much
to learn from that tradition. Disengagement impoverishes both the discipline
and the Catholic intellectual tradition.
How so? Because a valid body of knowledge is intrinsic to the universe of being
and its linkage to the Creator of being
connects it more easily to further bodies of knowledge. An academic discipline and this tradition should not seem
like two sumo wrestlers trying to best
one another since they are in a constitutive relationship to one another. Further, one might recall Paul’s claim that
“knowledge will pass away” (I Corinthians 13:8) unless faith, hope, and love
give it a place in eternity.
Engaging otherness is not something
abstract in my mind. It is the way Jesus
of Nazareth operated in his life. The
complaint that eventually got him eliminated was that he didn’t associate with
the right people, with those who were
in the know. He evidently preferred to
have table fellowship with the tax collectors and the sinners, i.e., with those
who were marginal to being right, righteous, one of us! It would be worth
noting that the Gospel often appears
to come out of his conversations with
the otherness of these unrighteous types.
He learned from the vulnerable, from
those who were judged marginal at best.
Look at the Beatitudes and ask yourself whether the insights they convey
might have originated in conversations
with those who hungered and thirsted
for justice. “Blessed are the lowly, for
they shall inherit the earth.” Yes, he
taught; but yes, he learned too; that
is the point of having an intellectual
tradition that is as much a “will be”
as a “used to be.”
But if a Catholic educational institution moves from being a place of hospi-

tality that simply houses pluralisms to
one that engages them in their many
forms, the major beneficiary will be the
Church. It has much to learn from the
day-to-day praxis of the American network of Catholic higher education institutions insofar as they have engaged
their own plural voices. “Catholic” must
not settle into being a mark of the
Church. It was meant instead to be a
challenge, to send a signal to the whole
world of the good news of the inclusion
of all humanity with its God. We live in
hope of a catholicity, an eschatological
fullness with the Church in all its institutions assisting in midwifing that fullness in the course of its history.

When the disciplines
are engaged by
the Catholic intellectual tradition, they
have much to teach
their interlocutors and
much to learn from
that tradition.
I am really saying there is a poverty
in our doctrine about the meaning of
Catholic. So far we have understood a
mere sliver of what that doctrine must
become and is more likely to become
if you engage the world’s pluralisms
locally. At times our church seems to
exhibit a hospitality redolent of the
Pharisee who invited Jesus to dinner
in order to take the measure of his
orthodoxy. Jesus was a faithful Jew
who learned to become a syncretist
because of the virtue of hospitality
that he accorded the seemingly heterodox. His orthodoxy became as capacious as the heart of his Father.
What difference will it make in this
world of realpolitik if this opportunity
for the engagement of pluralism is neglected? The praxis of the hospitality
of engagement will not develop into a
doctrine of catholicity. And without
such a doctrine, the world will not

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know the heart of God or the host
that God commissioned to engage its
pluralisms. A campus that aims at being
a place that is merely agreeable, that has
learned a tolerance, that shirks the task
of seeking truth together, has lost an
opportunity to show that human unity
“belongs to the innermost nature of
the Church.” (Vatican II)
But, you ask, do we have on our
campuses the competence necessary to
engage the disciplines with a knowledge
of the Catholic intellectual tradition?
Yes and no. You may not have savants
who are explicitly knowledgeable about
this tradition. But having conducted
twelve workshops this year with faculty
members around the country and listened to the good each is about and the
wholes they are trying to birth through
their disciplines, it is easy to see God
at work in their strivings. Why say this?
Because those in each discipline whose
questions are really theirs and whose
hunt for answers is open to wherever
the data lead them—these qualify for
the accolade of being hospitable since
they are engaging otherness from within their area of competence and are
being stretched by it. And since God is
the author of the Catholic intellectual
tradition then there isn’t any sharkinfested moat to cross for the necessary
engagements to take place. Pope Benedict XVI asked this week at the noon
blessing on the feast of St. Thomas
Aquinas, “Why should faith and reason
be afraid of each other, if they can express themselves better by meeting and
engaging one another?” So ask yourself, Is the hospitality on my campus
sufficiently in evidence that the Church
at large can learn from it? We sorely
need a development of our doctrine of
catholicity in order to better host the
world’s pluralisms.
John C. Haughey, S.J., is a Senior Research
Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center
at Georgetown University.
Reprinted with permission of the author, from
Woodstock Report, March 2007, no. 87.

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Yeast: A Parable for Catholic Higher Education
by walter ong, s.j.

I

t is common knowledge that the
problem of pluralism today increasingly haunts Catholic institutions of higher education, that is, colleges and universities founded under
specifically Catholic auspices and now
having to redesign themselves in our
present educational world. We think
particularly of such institutions in the
United States, where they have existed
in far higher proportion than in any
other part of the world. But the problem is worldwide.
In the forefront are such matters as
faculties that include many members
who are not Catholic, student bodies
equally diversified in their religious
commitments or lack thereof, questions of academic freedom, and, to cap
it all, the clear desire of Catholic institutions of higher education to open
themselves to persons and points of
view other than exclusively Catholic
while maintaining a genuine Catholic
identity. To this should be added a
new awareness of the flexibility of
Catholic teachings that many had
earlier said were inflexible.
This awareness of flexibility developed widely over the past hundred years
or so with the massive growth of knowledge in all fields, scientific and humanistic, creating new sensitivity to the fact
that Jesus lived in a historical world and
founded his church in a describable
historical context. He thereby necessarily designed it for some kind of continuing development through history
in the various and developing cultures
across the world so as for it to realize
its catholicity. Thus “inculturation,” in
the sense of the rooting of the church
in the distinctive features of real value
in a given culture, is a significantly established and operational term today.
There is no easy answer to problems raised by our necessary pluralism.
Solutions have to be worked out as we
come to understand better the Catholic
Church and the forces the Church is
called on to work with. Many models
have been proposed for thinking about
the Church and, by implication, about
the Catholic identity of Catholic universities and colleges. I should like

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simply to advance for consideration a
way of thinking about this identity
that, to the best of my knowledge, has
not heretofore been made use of. It
is not a cure-all, but may be a help.
It consists in a more thorough examination of the concept of “catholic”
itself and of reflection on a Gospel
parable in connection with the Catholic
institutions of higher learning.
“Catholic” is commonly said to
mean “universal,” a term from the
Latin universalis. The equation is not
quite exact. If “universal” is the adequate meaning of “catholic,” why did
the Latin Church, which in its vernacular language had the word universalis, not use this word but rather borrowed from Greek the term katholikos
instead, speaking of the “one, holy,
catholic, and apostolic church” (to put
it into English) instead of the “one,
holy, universal, and apostolic church”?
The etymological history of universalis
is not in every detail clear, but it certainly involves the concepts of unum,
“one,” and vertere, “turn.” It suggests
using a compass to make a circle
around a central point. It is an inclusive
concept in the sense that the circle
includes everything within it. But by
the same token it also excludes everything outside it. Universalis contains a
subtle note of negativity. Katholikos does
not. It is more unequivocally positive. It
means simply “through-the-whole” or
“throughout-the-whole”—kata or
kath, through or throughout; holos,
whole, from the same Indo-European root as our English “whole.”
Perhaps katholikos was favored by
the Latin (as well as by the Greek)
church because it resonated so well
with Jesus’ parable in Mt. 13:33
(echoed in Lk. 13:21): “The reign of
God is like yeast which a woman took
and kneaded into three measures of
flour. Eventually the whole mass of
dough began to rise.” Yeast is a plant, a
fungus, something that grows with no
particular limits to its borders. If the
mass of dough is added to, the yeast
grows into the added portion. Understood as catholic in terms of this parable, the Kingdom or the Church is a
limitless, growing reality, destined ultimately to be present everywhere and to
affect everything, though by no means

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to convert everything into itself. Yeast
acts on dough, but it does not convert
all the dough into yeast, nor is it able
to do so.
Living yeast corresponds to what
the Catholic Church has really been,
for the Catholic Church has in fact
never been at all definitively “universal” in the sense that it has actually included all parts of the human race or
even anywhere near the greater part
of the human race. But if it has never
been by any means “universal” in such
a sense, it is certainly “catholic” in the
sense that it has always been in one
place or another growing, spreading
into new dough, in accord with the
parable of the yeast. Of recent years, it
has become more widespread than ever
before, geographically and culturally. It
is, in fact, more through-the-whole of
humanity across the face of the globe
today than in any earlier age of history.
The variety of the faces representing
the Church at the Second Vatican
Council made this evident. No longer
is it possible to say, as Hilaire Belloc
once did, “The Church is Europe,
Europe is the Church.” This is inclusivist-exclusivist universalism with
a vengeance, a statement that, it
appears to me, is de facto un-Christian, although I am sure not with any
conscious intent.
Many of Jesus’ parables—just as,
quite commonly, other parables—are
multiple in signification. There are
complex meanings implied here in this
one, although the commentaries that
I have examined often develop any
implications of the parable at best only
minimally. In his Models of the Church,
Avery Dulles gives it more attention
than most commentators, classing it
briefly with other “botanical models”
of the Church that show, for example,
the Church’s “capacity of rapid expansion,” as this parable surely does. For
his purposes, he had no occasion for
pushing analysis of the parable of the
yeast further.
But here I am concerned with pushing it further for an admittedly specialized reason—because of the particular
value the parable seems to have in
bringing out the usefulness of the concept of “catholic,” more exhaustively

understood, in treating problems of
pluralism in Catholic institutions of
higher education today. The applicants
that suggest themselves here do not
apply perfectly—Father Dulles notes,
quite appositely, that parables all have
obvious applicational limits—but this
particular parable can apparently give
us some better conceptual hold on
certain elements in the problems of
pluralism that we face in Catholic institutions of higher education. Admittedly, in emerging only now, this fuller
relevance of the parable shows itself
belatedly, but certain relevancies in
Jesus’ saying can make themselves
known only in ages later than Jesus’
own age. The word of God has fertility for the future as well as for the
time in which it is first uttered.
The parable of the yeast can show
more than the Church’s capacity for
natural expansion. Yeast not only
grows quickly but also nourishes itself
on the dough in which it grows. This
suggests that the Church should build
into itself the cultures or mixtures of
cultures in which it finds itself. A
Catholic higher educational institution should build into its tradition
what those who happen not to be
Catholic have to offer that fits its
tradition and what it might otherwise
not know at all. The Church does not
have from the start everything it will
later become, any more than the
yeast does, other than the Church’s
own principle of life, which is no less
than Jesus Christ himself, who lived
as a visible human being in a culture
or mixture of cultures quite other than
any in the world today and whose
Mystical Body, the Church, must be inculturated now in today’s world and in
the world of the future, nourished on
today’s and tomorrow’s kinds of food.
If, however, yeast nourishes itself
on the dough in which it is placed, it
does not do so in such a way as to
spoil the dough—not from the Human
point of view, certainly. It makes the
dough more usable, more nourishing.
It not only grows in what it feeds on,
but it also improves what it feeds on
and makes it possible for others to feed
on it as well as on itself, the yeast. The
Catholic Church is not out to confront
and destroy the cultures it is set in or

due to encounter, but to interpenetrate
these cultures, and not only on its own
terms, but interactively. Yeast grows in
different sorts of dough—white, whole
wheat, rye, and so on, not converting
one sort of these doughs into any of the
others. Moreover, any dough with yeast
growing in it can be added to a completely different batch of dough, and
the yeast will act on the new batch in
accord with the way the new batch is
constituted (white dough, whole wheat,
rye, whatever): The Church transplanted
from any given culture to a new culture
can live in a way that fits that particular
new culture without losing its own
identity, just as in doing its work of
leavening, yeast does not sacrifice its
own identity but remains growing yeast.
In every case, in accordance with
Jesus’ parable, the dough gains value
from the yeast (the Kingdom, the
Catholic Church) and, at the same
time, the yeast (the Kingdom, the
Catholic Church) gains. It nourishes
itself on the dough, comes to a realization of new potentialities (which
include a better understanding of
itself), and in all cases, at least we can
hope, both yeast and dough work for
the good of human beings.
What are some of the ways in which
the parable of the yeast might help
in conceiving of religious pluralism in
Catholic institutions of higher education today? We can consider here only
a few sample applications.
1) The faith and academic subjects.
In a Catholic college or university, the
yeast—the Kingdom in the sense of the
Catholic faith—is constantly being
brought into contact with new materials. These in-clude materials in philosophy, the other humanities, the sciences
and all the rest of developing human
knowledge, as well as in its own special
ways, theology itself.
Here, there is no question of indoctrinating disciplines that are themselves
separate from the faith, but of interacting with them as each requires—in patterns that have to be worked out over
time, as the interacting takes place.
The ferment of the yeast, the Kingdom in the sense of the Church and
the Church’s faith, will work in different
ways, not all of which are by any means
predictable now. At times it may have
no immediate grounds for interacting
at all. At times, new grounds will arise:
Modern high technology has made

ecology a new massive Catholic theological and practical pastoral problem,
as it hardly was before.
From its beginning, Catholic teaching has learned by contact with what
is not itself and even what is opposed
to itself. For example, St. Augustine
and many others learned from pagan
rhetoric, the most pervasive of all
branches of learning in the West as
well as in the Middle East over centuries. St. Thomas Aquinas learned
from the pagan Aristotle—and met
massive resistance for his use of this
pagan author, who, moreover, was
mediated to the Latin West through
Muslims, Arabs, and others. In our
own day, Catholic teaching has learned
from certain kinds of existentialism
and especially from personalist philosophy. One of personalism’s most
ardent proponents was Jewish, Martin Buber, whose book I and Thou is a
cardinal personalist text. Personalism
has had its effects on Catholic teaching
—notably in the writings and talks of
Pope John Paul II. The yeast of the
Kingdom has been expanding through
vast new batches of dough over the centuries and will continue to do so even
more radically in our computer and information age and in other ages to come.
2) The relationship of the faith and the
faculty, Catholic and other. With regard
to the faculty as individual persons, we
could hope that the action of the faith,
seen as Catholic in the sense we have
been employing here, would grow
within the lives of individual faculty
members, in whatever way and at whatever rate the individual finds herself or
himself adapted to such growth. Presumably, having aligned herself or himself with an openly Catholic university,
a person who is not Catholic is willing to live somehow in contact with the
yeast of faith. But this does not of itself
mean commitment to letting the faith
permeate and transform her or his
whole life, as it would, or should, the
life of a professed Catholic. In cases of
individual non-Catholics, the action of
the yeast might mean ultimately such
total commitment. Whether it does or
not is an entirely personal matter under
divine grace. Catholic institutions of
higher learning have had hundreds and
more utterly loyal faculty members of
other faiths or of no faith at all who
have lived comfortably and happily
in the Catholic context for most or
all of their academic careers, not feeling imposed on. The Catholic faith
wants to be interactive where interac-

tion is feasible and called for, not
where it is unwelcome.

homiletic, and devotional life?

3) The relationship of the faith and the
students. Today, the college or university is no longer felt, as it used to
be several generations ago, in Catholic
or other religious circles or in secular
circles, as an institution functioning
in loco parentum, as set up so as to act in
the place of the students’ parents in relation to the students themselves (many
of whom today are in fact adults, married with children and, even occasionally, grandchildren). The Catholic
college or university retains many responsibilities to its students, some of
them even enlarged responsibilities,
religious and moral as well as intellectual, although they are framed rather
differently now. Catholic colleges and
Catholic theology, incorporating and
commenting on the Church’s teaching,
and courses on the teachings of other
religions, are to be available in Catholic
universities and colleges. In core curricula, a certain number of such courses
will be required normally of all students,
if only to avoid ignorance of the massive religious dimensions of human life
throughout history. Students not professing the Catholic faith need not elect
specifically Catholic theology courses.
4) Cosmology. If the Catholic faith
is viewed as yeast, as something designed to grow through human consciousness under grace into more
and more of God’s creation, Catholic
institutions of higher education are
desperately in need of every sort of
knowledge available to fulfill their
Catholic mission. One of the points at
which this need, and the question of
pluralism at present haunting Catholic
education, can be examined fruitfully
regards cosmology. “In the beginning...God created the heavens and the
earth” (Gen. 1:1). Catholic teaching is
ineradicably involved with cosmology,
with study of the universe that God
has created, for everything that exists,
save for God himself, is the creation
of God, something of his. Today, we
know inestimably more about what
this creation was than the human
authors of Genesis or any of their
contemporaries could know. The
dough in which the yeast of the
Kingdom is planted is an immeasurably greater mass of immeasurably
greater age than we used to think.
Does this knowledge that we now
have show practically in Catholic life—
that is, in such things as our pastoral,

When we think of God as creator
of the world or universe, at least in
our pastoral (including liturgical),
homiletic, and devotional life, it appears that we are still most likely to
think of the world pretty much in
archaic terms. What we see around
us is accommodated directly to the
ordinary human senses and imagination, that is, the visible earth and
what surrounds it, the sun and moon
and planets and stars as they appear
to the unaided eye, a world full of
beauty and wonder, but constituting
not one billionth of what everyone
now knows the universe that God
created really is (though we do not
know all of it perfectly, for our knowledge is still growing). It is a universe
some 14 billion years old, with billions of galaxies each containing
billions of stars more or less the size
of our sun, a universe that has had
to undergo massive evolution to reach
the point where the existence of human beings was even possible. It took
billions of years for God’s material creation to organize itself and in places
cool down enough for DNA to exist
so that life could be possible, for DNA
furnishes building blocks of living
organisms. Humanity is not DNA, but
without DNA there could be no human life, involving nonmaterial human
consciousness. Although responsible
calculations still vary somewhat, humanity, ourselves, homo sapiens, is quite
possibly some 350,000 years old. Since
the appearance of homo sapiens and
the consciousness with which humanity
is endowed, God’s creation has matured
painstakingly but with growing acceleration through the invention of writing,
print, computers, and the changes in
thought processes and thought management that these technologies of the
word have involved. The changes have
resulted in our vast humanistic studies,
enriched today immeasurably beyond
such studies in earlier ages.
God’s creation has matured in our
vast information culture with its concomitant interpretation culture, in
which the interrelationships of everything—intellectual, sociological, political, scientific, philosophical, religious,
psychological, and so on without end—
are investigated, if not always successfully, certainly with an intricate sophistication and depth impossible in earlier
generations. When we think of God’s
creation in the ordinary context of faith,
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Catholic Intellectual Tradition
in the Public Square
by alan wolfe

N

on-Catholics routinely find in
Catholicism something missing in their own religious or
intellectual traditions. For those unhappy with the direction the modern
world has taken, especially in the years
since the cultural revolution of the
1960s, Catholicism stands as a mighty
alternative. As Peter Berger wrote in
1967, “Catholicism, for reasons intrinsic to its tradition, has tried hardest
in maintaining a staunchly resistant
stance in the face of secularization and
pluralism, and indeed has tried down
to our own century to engage in vigorous counterattacks designed to reestablish something like Christendom
at least within limited territories.” Or,
as the theologian Stanley Hauerwas, a
Methodist, puts it more recently (and
more succinctly), “Catholics, more than
any other people, must resist the presumption of modernity.” Reading comments like these, I am reminded of the
work of a first-rate journalist named
Alan Ehrenhalt, whose book, The Lost
City, evokes Chicago-style Catholicism
of the 1950s, with its emphasis on hierarchy and obedience, as a preferable
moral system to the anarchy that followed in its wake. Catholicism, for
these writers, plays the role of the road
not taken, the secret history of the
twentieth century which, if only we
knew better, we would have lived out.

That road is not my road. (Indeed, I
think there is something extraordinarily presumptuous of non-Catholics
asking Catholics to forgo the benefits of
modernity that they themselves enjoy.)
There were indeed antimodernist tendencies in both the official teachers
of the Catholic Church and in the
way ordinary Catholics led their lives.
I have no interest in revisiting them.
Berger and Hauerwas may see in the
Catholic intellectual tradition a principled intellectual opposition to contemporary relativism and hedonism; I am
more likely to see a church that was
far too soft on anti-Semitism (especially, I have to add, when it counted),
took a certain pride in banning great
books, and produced a Syllabus of

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Errors and attacks on liberalism
that bet on the wrong horses as far
as the future was concerned. Had
those aspects of Catholicism perpetuated themselves unchanged into the
start of the twenty-first century, America’s Catholic colleges and universities
would continue to be on the defensive, for the burden of proof would
be on them to demonstrate their
proper place in a liberal and pluralistic democracy.
Fortunately, however, the Catholic
tradition is better than that. It furnished a John Courtney Murray. It
kept alive an important strain of natural law teaching. It experienced
Vatican II. And it produced a generation of highly educated middle-class
suburban professionals anxious to give
their children the best education a
university can provide. It would be difficult for anyone except for the most
intransigent of conservatives to believe
that the Church, at least in the United
States, is not better off because of
their existence.

The important point to make is
that a natural law tradition leaves one
predisposed to believe that there are
certain truths in the world that
remain true irrespective of whether
the laws and conventions of any particular society adhere to them. At its
worst, belief in natural law can lead to
ideological rigidity and inflexible inhumanity. But at its best, respect for natural law gives one the self-confidence that
makes possible the passion and curiosity that fuels intellectual inquiry.
No one could have predicted,
thirty or so years ago, that such selfconfidence would ever be necessary
in American higher education. At
the height of the cold war, American
universities produced those called by
David Halberstam “the best and the
brightest,” and humility was not exactly one of their personality traits.
But in remarkably short time, the
culture of American academia shifted
from the hubristic arrogance of
those who believed that they could
bend a foreign country to their will

At a time when the only thing we can
know is that we cannot know anything,
the claims of natural law suggest to us
not that the world is unknowable, but that
we have simply stopped, for whatever
reason, trying to know it.
Let me, then, turn directly to
aspects of the Catholic tradition that
have a more positive role to play, not
only in higher education, but in American public life more generally. Certainly the most important of them is
the natural law tradition. I will not
address here—or, for that matter, anywhere—the question of whether God
is the origin of our natural rights
and duties, for I have little taste for
philosophical and theological analysis.

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to those currently ensconced in the
university who doubt the possibility
of will, truth, morality, beauty, or
any other category that strikes them
as ready for deconstruction. At a
time when the only thing we can
know is that we cannot know anything, the claims of natural law suggest to us not that the world is
unknowable, but that we have simply
stopped, for whatever reason, trying
to know it.

Natural law, in short, inoculates us
against postmodernism. Some of you
may know an article I wrote a year or
two ago recounting my visits to colleges and universities shaped by the
tradition of American evangelical Protestantism. There I recall my surprise at
discovering how strong intellectually
many of these institutions had become.
But I also expressed astonishment to
learn that Stanley Fish is something of
a hero to those who teach in the English Department at Wheaton College
or that postmodern philosophy is all
the rage at the Fuller Theological Seminary. While there are no doubt exceptions of which I am unaware, I have yet
to come across quite that much enthusiasm for postmodernism at the Catholic
colleges and universities with which I
am familiar. The postmodern evangelicals with whom I talk believe that one
can be skeptical of all truths while maintaining the truth of God’s existence.
Catholics are more likely to hold that
the truth of God’s existence must mean
the truth of man’s reason, art’s beauty,
or universal morality. No wonder, then,
that at Boston College one will never
hear cries of “Hey Hey Ho Ho, Western
Civ’s Gotta Go.” Take away all those
dead white males, and you have pretty
much eliminated the Catholic tradition from the face of the earth. I have
nothing but respect for those Catholic
colleges and universities that continued
to defend the humanities through the
entire, but now seemingly past, age of
suspicion against them.
Two other side-effects of Catholicism’s sympathy for natural law are also
worth noting because, once again, both
of them came as a surprise—at least to
me. The first of these is the sympathy
that emerged on America’s Catholic
colleges and universities for liberalism.
By this I do not mean the everyday use
of the word liberalism that refers to the
Democratic Party and its support for
social reform, although it remains true
that most Catholics, and most Catholic
academics, remain liberal in that sense.
The more important affinity in this case
is the one between Catholic respect for
natural law and liberal conceptions of
fundamental human rights. It was, many

of you will recall, John Courtney
Murray who pointed out that the great
enlightenment thinkers who wrote the
Declaration of Independence and the
Bill of Rights, Protestant and deist
though they may have been, were
nonetheless articulating natural law
principles in asserting freedom of
speech, press, and religion. It is worth
keeping his point in mind when we
ponder why evangelical Protestant literary theorists love Stanley Fish. For
if there is one theme that runs throughout all of Fish’s writings—or, for that
matter, those of his former colleague
Stanley Hauerwas—it is a deep hatred
of liberalism. How ironic, then, that
of the three intellectual traditions I
have been discussing—Catholicism,
evangelical Protestantism, and postmodernism—the only one that finds
something of value in liberalism is the
one whose Pope made such a determined nineteenth century attack upon it.
It is certainly not an obligation
of defenders of Catholic education
as it used to be to consider the situation facing non-Catholics. But just
as Catholic colleges and universities
have become enriched throughout contact with the non-Catholic world, nonCatholics have benefited from their
contact with the Catholic world. I
know that I have. What upsets me the
most about the views of writers like
Burtchaell and Neuhaus is their lack
of recognition that a Catholic education can be as valuable for those outside the tradition as those inside. If
you have something that you believe
makes sense, you ought to want to share
it. If you restrict it, you cheapen it.
Of course it is true that shared things
change by being shared. Catholics
should not treat their educational
institutions the way some evangelical Protestants treat their joy in Jesus—
here it is, take it whether you want it
or not, question your own faith but
don’t ask me to question mine. If that
is what a Catholic education is meant
to be, Catholic educators would be
better off staying in their own academic subculture. Nor should Catholic
colleges and universities simply copy
the institutions of mainstream America.
As David Riesman and Christopher
Jencks wisely wrote in 1968, “The
important question…is not whether
a few Catholic universities prove
capable of competing with Harvard
or Berkeley on the latter’s terms, but
whether Catholicism can provide an

ideology and/or personnel for developing alter-natives to the Harvard-Berkeley model of excellence.” I believe
that the passage of time since they
wrote these words has answered their
question. Catholic colleges and universities that emphasize the Western
tradition, pay serious attention to the
needs of undergraduates, have the confidence not to make enemies of liberalism and science, and appreciate the
human side of human beings have
developed precisely such an alternative. That is why I teach at one of them.
To be sure, Boston College, like
other Catholic institutions, is not what
it was when it was all male, nearly all
Irish, and overwhelmingly Catholic in
the composition of its faculty. There
are, I admit, too few priests on campus
even for my comfort. But it remains
recognizably Catholic, perhaps more
recognizably Catholic for those who
are not Catholic than for those who
are. If that sounds like a paradox, perhaps my appreciation for the Catholic
intellectual tradition has taught me
the importance of paradoxical thinking.
Alan Wolfe is a professor of Political Science and
the Director of the Boisi Center for Religion in
American Public Life at Boston College.
Reprinted with permission of the author from
the Summer 2002 issue of Current Issues, the
publication of the Association of Catholic
Colleges and Universities.

—

Yeast: A Parable

Continued from Page 11

do we effectively advert to this creation
that has as part of itself depth psychology,
robots, space shuttles, trips to the moon?
There have been some beginnings
in relating the faith to the known fullness of God’s creation. One thinks of
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose work
was pioneering and remains invaluable,
but who is now no longer entirely upto-date. Ecology has become a theological issue, as we become increasingly
aware of human beings’ growing responsibility for God’s creation around
us. Anthropic thinking has made us
consider how the universe we know
from science appears somehow constituted from the beginning—the “big
bang” that many postulate—to build
up a world able to sustain humanity.
But most of this work and other related work has not affected our devotional, liturgical, homiletic, and pastoral way of life, where the archaic
visions of creation seem to linger.
Paul tells us (Rom. 1:20) that we learn
of God’s grandeur from “the things
He has made.” But now that we have
found out so much more about what
these things really are, in our actual
living of the faith we have yet to learn
from them. We need to bring present
knowledge of the actual universe to
bear on such things as our thinking
of God’s creative act, of the life and
life expectancy of the Church, of eschatological time, of the Incarnation and
the Second Coming, and so much else.

And on what terrain more promising
than that of Catholic institutions of
higher education? The urgency that
they be continued and strengthened
is greater than ever before.
Moreover, this undertaking to
engage the faith in God’s real world
would seem to demand pluralism. We
cannot expect to draw from purely
Catholic sources the knowledge we
need for this vast enterprise. If the
Catholic faith, the yeast, is to penetrate all of God’s creation, we need the
collaboration of all the knowledgeable
people we can relate to. In a universe
some 14 billion years old, the Church is
very, very young. We need to look back
to the real perspectives of the past to
see how young we really are. Our work
of understanding the relationship of
the faith to the world is possibly the
major devotional and pastoral and
homiletic task of the years ahead, as
well as a major task in other areas of
theology. Fortunately, our faith is
future-oriented. We have never felt
called to get back to the Garden of
Eden but to look to the future coming
of Christ. The Catholic intellectual life
that lies ahead is one we can welcome.
Walter Ong, S.J. (1912-2003) was a Professor of
Humanities at Saint Louis University for 30 years,
and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.
Reprinted with permission of the publishers from
the April 7, 1990 issue of America.

—

The yeast that is the Kingdom has
a great deal to engage itself with here.

What Is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition?
by t. frank kennedy, s.j.

I

n 1982 after doctoral studies in
music history at the University of
California, I began teaching at a
Jesuit college. In preparing my classes
I quickly realized something that I had
never noticed as a grad student. One
could teach the history of western civilization through the history of western,
sacred music, if one wanted to do so. I
suppose that this was the first time I
confronted part of the breadth of what
we refer to as the “Catholic Intellectual
Tradition.” The first thought that I
gleaned from this insight was something
about this wideness that encompasses

the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. The
very breadth of the tradition led me to
consider the relativity of in-sights coming from a myriad of intellectual pursuits and sources that inform and form
us. These sources all speak about human
identity, and are often held in tension
in the same way that the world and
society are experienced in tension—
a creative tension, dialogic in nature,
always respecting the person, that finally
says there are many truths that hold
sway over us in our human complexities, and we are far from completely
plumbing the depths of these mysterious truths. For instance, as a musicologist, I have often asked myself, Why is it
that at times of great spiritual renewal

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in the Church, the artistic expressions
of that faith attempting to renew itself
are often at a lesser level of beauty or
complexity than other times? Shouldn’t
it be the opposite? How and why is it
necessary for us to respect our consciences, but also respect the voice of
the community attentive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit? These tensions
that we experience are the wonders of
our faith—the signs yet again in our
times that the Spirit is alive as our faith
seeks Wisdom.
T. Frank Kennedy S.J., is The Peter Canisius Chair,
Director of the Jesuit Institute, and Chairperson of
the Music Department at Boston College.

–––

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13

Living Conversations
Higher Education in a Catholic Context
by michael himes

O

n one of the many occasions
when he was asked why he
had become a Catholic,
Chesterton replied that he became
Catholic because Catholicism is a community with a deep and rich sense
of tradition. And, he said, belonging
to a community with such a sense
of tradition is extremely important
because only then can one be freed
from the most degrading of all forms
of servitude—of being merely a child
of one’s time. That is, I think, immensely wise. Being part of a tradition means that you do not have to
speak with North Americans alone;
you can speak with South Americans
and Africans and Europeans and Asians
and Australians. It also means that you
are not confined to speaking only with
late twentieth-century people; you can
converse with Plato and Emily Dickinson and Mozart and Teresa of Avila.
You can speak with Dante and Madame
Curie, with Newton and Euclid and
Jane Austen. You can talk with all sorts
of people who are not of your own age
and clime. You are freed from being
merely a child of your time and place.
In the Catholic tradition, we call this
the communion of saints. That communion or conversation has been going on for a very long time—and you
and I are invited to participate in it.
One of the richest elements in the
Catholic intellectual tradition is its
notion of the communion of saints,
and within the Jesuit educational tradition one of the richest elements is the
insistence on engaging in a transtemporal as well as a transspatial conversation. Our students desperately need
such traditions so that they are not
limited to their own contemporaries
for companionship. This is a very important issue for those of us who teach
in those traditions to consider: How do
we introduce people into a living tradition, whether within the sciences or
the humanities (and, I hope, both)?
I am inclined to think that one of
the wisest principles of education that I
have ever come across is what William
James used to tell his students at Har-

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vard at the beginning of this century.
He called it “the pragmatic principle.”
As James summed it up, the pragmatic
principle is “if it’s true, it makes a difference; if it makes no difference, it’s
not true.” Every term I urge my students to make that the measuring rod
of everything I say, they say, or we read
together in the courses I teach. If, for
example, you can’t possibly imagine
what difference it makes that God is
triune; that is, it makes no difference
to anyone, anywhere, anywhen (as
James liked to put it), then effectively
it is not true. One has to be able to see
or, at least, to imagine, what difference
any statement makes in order to declare

ties—and not in a few isolated courses—to reflect critically and, if at all possible, in a multidisciplinary way on their
experiences in service and in other cultures. We cannot permit ourselves or
them the mistake of thinking that
“out there you do, in here we think.”
Here we think about what is done
there. We must lead them into critical thinking about their experience.
And we should do all in our power to
make certain that engagement in service for social justice is not limited to a
few students or simply to those who
choose to involve themselves. Indeed,
those who do not choose it are most
often precisely those who need it most.

Direct engagement in social justice and
service to others is crucial to our students
and to our task as their teachers.
that statement true. This pragmatic
principle, I suggest, is bred into Americans. we get it with our mother’s milk.
And therefore it must be taken with
great seriousness in the Catholic intellectual tradition as that tradition is
lived out in this country. Thus, we
cannot allow the formation of future
intellectuals (and whom else are we
teaching?) within the Catholic tradition to remain simply theoretical. For
what we say to be seen as true, our
students must see the concrete difference that our statements make. They
must test out what we teach them.
What we say to them about the value
and dignity of human life must be experienced by them as making a difference in fact to someone, somewhere,
somewhen. And it is certainly not
enough for us to say, “Oh, well, there
is the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, and there
are various summer service projects in
which the students can go off and do
all sorts of swell things for others.” We
cannot allow that divorce between the
lecture hall and their concrete experience. When students return to our
campuses, they must find opportuni-

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Why is it so important? There
are many reasons, but let me offer
one that matters especially to a theologian. It has to do with what, with
all due respect to Saint Anselm and
Saint Thomas Aquinas, is the only
effective proof for the existence of
God that I know. There are many
proofs for an “Unmoved Mover” or
an “Uncaused Cause,” but that has
nothing to do with the God who is
least wrongly understood as pure and
perfect self-gift. The proof of which
I am thinking is found in Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamozov. Fairly early in
the novel, Dostoevsky presents us
with a series of conversations with
Father Zosima, the wise and holy
monk whose words continue to echo
in the book long after he has died.
The last of these conversations is
with “a woman without faith.” An
obviously distraught woman approaches Zosima to request his assistance with
a problem that she says is destroying
her. We quickly find out that she is
in good health, prosperous, and seemingly untroubled in any obvious way.
But she insists that something horrible

has happened to her and that her
whole life is being drained of meaning
and purpose. She goes so far as to
tell the monk that if he cannot help
her, she thinks she will kill herself.
She explains that, at some point—she
doesn’t know how, for there was no
great crisis—she ceased to believe in
God. It happened bit by bit, and she
herself was shocked to realize that
she no longer believed. Now everything is colorless, tasteless, to her.
Everything has become ashes. She says,
quoting Pushkin, nothing is real save
the weeds that grow on her grave.
Zosima tells her that what she is experiencing is the worst thing that can
happen to a human being, and that
he thinks he can help her. She must
go home and every day, without fail,
in the most concrete and practical
way possible, she must love the people
around her. If she does that, Zosima
says, then bit by bit she will come
to the point at which she cannot but
believe in God. “This way,” he says,
“has been tried; this way is certain.”
The whole of the novel is a commentary on this scene, a huge debate
about Zosima’s tried and certain way. I
think that Dostoevsky is right: the only
workable proof for the existence of
God is an experience, and that experience arises out of daily concrete and
practical love for those around us.
After all, long ago, we were told
by the author of the First Letter of
John that anyone claiming to love
God, whom he cannot see, while not
loving the brother or sister whom he
does see is a liar (I John 4:20). Not a
liar in the sense of one who deliberately and knowingly tells an untruth,
but rather one who speaks falsely
because he doesn’t know what he’s
talking about. He cannot know what
the word “God” means because God
is agape, pure and perfect self-giving
love. If that is the least wrong way to
think about God, then one cannot
know who God is—and therefore
that God is—if one never knows
agapic love. After all, to compare
absolute Mystery to self-giving love
isn’t very helpful if one has no clue
what self-giving love is. Comparing

the Unknown to the unknown isn’t
very helpful. One must have the concrete experience of agape to understand who God is and, more importantly, to experience that God is. And
if belief in the existence of God—
which is, among other things, affirmation of purpose, and meaning in
life—is central to ones existence as a
fully human being (and I cannot imagine how the question whether there is
purpose and meaning in life is not),
and if education is not merely vocational training but the development of
a fully human being, and further, if the
tried and certain way to belief in God
is concrete and practical love of others,
then direct engagement in social justice
and service to others is crucial to our
students and to our task as their teachers. Not just an important auxiliary—
crucial. We cannot introduce others
into the Catholic intellectual tradition
without it.
Michael Himes is a priest of the Diocese
of Brooklyn and Professor of Theology at
Boston College.
Reprinted with permission of the author from
the Fall 1995 issue of Conversations on Jesuit
Higher Education.

—

The End of Education
The Fragmentation of the American University
alasdair macintyre

W

hat should be the distinctive calling of the American Catholic university
or college here and now? It should
be to challenge its secular counterparts
by recovering both for them and for
itself a less fragmented conception
of what an education beyond high
school should be, by identifying what
has gone badly wrong with even the
best of secular universities. From a
Catholic point of view, the contemporary secular university is not at fault
because it is not Catholic. It is at fault
insofar as it is not a university.
Yet the major Catholic universities
seem unlikely to accept this calling, if
only because their administrative leaders are for the most part hell-bent on
imitating their prestigious secular
counterparts, which already imitate one
another. So we find Notre Dame glancing nervously at Duke, only to catch
Duke in the act of glancing nervously
at Princeton. What is it that makes this
attitude so corrupting? What has gone
wrong with the secular university?
Begin with some well-known and
prosaic truths. Since the nineteenth
century, the number of disciplines
studied in American universities and
colleges has steadily multiplied. To
philosophy there were added psychology and political economy, soon to be
transformed into economics, to which

were later added political science and
sociology and anthropology. To mathematics and physics were added chemistry and biology. And within each of
these particular disciplines, subdisciplines and later sub-subdisciplines
multiplied. So it has been too with
the study of Greek and Latin languages and literature to which were
added first English, then French,
German, and Italian, then Russian,
Chinese, Arabic, Farsi and....So too it
has been with the multiplication of
historical studies, American, European, Asian, African, ancient, medieval,
modern, political, social, economic....
And in all these areas there is a growing array of subdisciplines and subsubdisciplines, not to speak of the
introduction of creative writing, of
theater arts, and...and...and....
The history of this multiplication
of disciplines is, of course, also a
history of increasing specialization
by scholars, and of the transformation of university or college teachers
into professionalized, narrowly focused
researchers who also happen to teach;
specialists whose professional success
and standing depend in large part
on the degree of their identification
with some particular subdiscipline
or subsubdiscipline. Each part of
the curriculum is someone’s responsibility, but no one has a responsibility for making the connections
between the parts. To whom should
this matter?

What Is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition?
by fred lawrence

A

t its best, Rome (taken symbolically) epitomized the vision
of the Catholic Intellectual
Tradition by its reception of both
Jerusalem (seat of Abrahamic religion) and Athens (seat of philosophy
and science). This creative receptivity entails living out of the tension
between reason and faith with intellectual honesty. This is exemplified
in Thomas Aquinas’ respect for
heretics and adversaries because they
help us to discover truth we have

not yet understood; and in Ignatius
Loyola’s insistence “that every good
Christian ought to be more willing
to give a good interpretation to the
statement of another than to condemn it as false.”
Alongside the two greatest works
on education—Plato’s Republic and
Rousseau’s Emile—stands Augustine’s
De Doctrina Christiana, which warns
that the Bible is not a book of science
and encourages Christians to learn all
they can about nature in order to
understand it. Further, the medieval

distinction between nature and supernature, between reason and faith,
issued an invitation to reason to claim
its proper field of inquiry, to work
out its own methods, to operate on
the basis of autonomous principles.
It was no accident that universities
began in a Catholic context, because
Love bestows the fullness of life on
human intelligence.
Fred Lawrence is an Associate Professor of
Theology at Boston College.

—

It should matter to anyone who
thinks it important what conception
of human nature and the human condition students have arrived at by the
time they enter the adult workplace and
therefore to any Catholic. For each of
the academic disciplines teaches us something significant about some aspect of
human nature and the human condition. Physics tells us which particles
and forces compose the body as a material object, while chemistry and biochemistry examine it as the site of various exchanges and reactions. What the
functioning structures of complex living
organisms, such as ourselves, are and
how they have evolved we learn from
biology, while sociology, anthropology,
economics, and history make human
beings intelligible in and through their
changing cultural and social relationships. Philosophy—together with the
history of inquiry—shows us how and
why we are able to move toward a more
and more adequate understanding of
ourselves and our environments, from
time to time transcending the limitations of previous modes of understanding. That human beings are also in key
part what they imagine themselves to
be, and how, without works of imagination, human life is diminished, we can
only learn from literary and other aesthetic studies. Yet, when we have learned
what all these different types of disciplines have to teach—and the catalogue
is far from complete—we confront questions that have so far gone unasked, just
because they are not questions answerable from within any one discipline.
Ours is a culture in which there is
the sharpest of contrasts between the
rigor and integrity with which issues of
detail are discussed within each specialized discipline and the self-indulgent
shoddiness of so much of public debate
on large and general issues of great import (compare Lawrence Summers on
economics with Lawrence Summers
on gender issues, Cardinal Schönborn
on theology with Cardinal Schönborn
on evolution). One reason for this contrast is the absence of a large educated
public, a public with shared standards of
argument and inquiry and some shared
conception of the central questions that
we need to address. Such a public
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The End of Education
Continued from Page 15

would be a good deal less willing to
allow issues that need to be debated to
be defined by those who are so wedded in advance to their own particular
partisan answers that they have never
found out what the questions are.
And it would be unwilling to tolerate
the straitjacketing of debate, so characteristic of television, within two-to
five-minute periods, during which
each participant interrupts and talks
down the others.
The adoption of such a curriculum
would serve both universities and the
wider society well. But it would be of
particular significance for a Catholic
university and for the Catholic community. Newman argued that it is
theology that is the integrative and
unifying discipline needed by any university, secular, Protestant, or Catholic.
And it is in the light afforded by the
Catholic faith and more especially by
Catholic doctrines concerning human
nature and the human condition that
theologians have a unique contribution
to make in addressing the questions
that ought to be central to an otherwise secular curriculum. It is not just
that Catholic theology has its own distinctive answers to those questions,
but that we can learn from it a way of
addressing those questions, not just as
theoretical inquiries, but as questions
with practical import for our lives, asked
by those who are open to God’s selfrevelation. Theology can become an
education in how to ask such questions.
On this point, it may be said that
theology departments are unlikely to
achieve this goal, if only because they
commonly suffer from the same ills
of specialization and fragmentation as
other departments. Yet of course the
degree to which this is so varies a
great deal from university to university. It is also true that everything or
almost everything that must be taught
in a reformed curriculum is already
taught somewhere in most universities,
yet not at present in a way that allows

students to bring together the various
things that they learn, so that they can
understand what is at stake in answering the key questions. We do possess the
intellectual resources to bring about the
kind of change I propose. What we lack,
in Catholic and in secular universities,
is the will to change, and that absence
of will is a symptom of a quite unwarranted complacency concerning our
present state and our present direction.
“What then about specialized training for research?” someone will ask.
Ours, they may say, is a knowledgebased economy and we cannot do without specialized researchers. The type
of curriculum that I am proposing may
teach students to ask questions in a
disciplined way, something that is certainly a valuable preliminary to instruction in genuine research techniques,
but it does not begin to supply the apprenticeship that researchers at the
cutting edge need. Indeed it does not.
It is liberal education, not job training.
But the lesson is to get rid of the confusions generated by our predecessors’
admiration for the German research
university and to supply both a liberal
education in the arts and sciences and,
for those who aspire to it, a professional, specialized training in research
in the natural or the human sciences.
The curriculum I am proposing, including theology, could perhaps be
taught in three well-structured and
strenuous years. A fourth year would
thereby become available for research
or professional training. We do not
have to sacrifice training in research
in order to provide our students with a
liberal education, just as we do not have
to fragment and deform so much of
our students’ education, as we do now.
Alasdair A. McIntyre is the Rev. John A. O’Brien
Senior Research Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Notre Dame.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher
from Commonweal, October 20, 2006.

Contributing
Publications
America, the national Catholic
weekly magazine, has been published since 1909 by Jesuits in the
United States for thinking Catholics
and those who want to know what
Catholics are thinking. America is
online at www.americamagazine.org.
Subscribe via the Web site or call
1-800-627-9533.
Established in 1924, Commonweal
is an independent journal of opinion
edited by lay Catholics. It has a special interest in religion (Catholic and
otherwise), politics, war and peace
issues, and culture. Along with articles on current events, it regularly
reviews books, plays, films, and television. It is published 22 times per
year. Its goal is “to bring a distinctively Catholic perspective to bear
on the issues of the day.” A trial
subscription is $25. To subscribe,
visit www.commonwealmagazine.org.
Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education is published by the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education, which
is jointly sponsored by the Jesuit Conference Board and the Board of the
Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. The magazine appears twice a
year, in fall and spring. Principal distribution is to faculty, administrators, and
staff of the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges
and universities and two theologates in
the United States. It is available in electronic form through the Marquette
University Library Web site.

Current Issues is the semiannual
journal of the Association of Catholic
Colleges and Universities. The purpose of the association is to promote
Catholic higher education by supporting the member institutions,
especially with reference to their

Catholic mission and character, and
to serve as The Voice of Catholic
Higher Education in the United
States. To sign up for a subscription
or receive an individual copy, contact
the ACCU office at (202) 457-0650
or email Michael Galligan-Stierle
at mgs@accunet.org.
Origins is a publication of the
Catholic News Service and the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops. It
publishes texts from the Vatican, the
Pope, bishops, Congress, Senate,
Supreme Court, and church leaders
around the world. To subscribe, visit
www.originsonline.com.
The Tablet is the British Catholic
weekly newsmagazine, established in
1840. Readers can be confident that
The Tablet will be a paper of progressive, but responsible Catholic
thinking, a place where orthodoxy is
at home but ideas are welcome. To
subscribe, visit www.thetablet.co.uk/
Woodstock Report is a quarterly
publication of The Woodstock
Theological Center, an independent
nonprofit institute established by
the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) at
Georgetown University in 1974.
The mission of the Woodstock
Theological Center is to engage in
theological and ethical reflection on
topics of social, economic, business,
scientific, cultural, religious, and
political importance. If you would
like to be placed on the mailing list
for the Woodstock Report, please
e-mail your name and postal address
to woodstock@georgetown.edu.

—

Learn all about the new C21 book series at:
www.bc.edu / church21
16

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The Holy See and the Challenges of Catholic
Higher Education in the United States
by + j. michael miller, csb

W

hen they are true to the
mission expected of them,
Catholic universities propose a particular vision that animates
their intellectual life and engages their
scholars in a common project. Such a
vision is all embracing, since it entails a
distinctively Catholic way of apprehending reality that inspires a university’s
teaching, scholarship, and service. A
Catholic university lives from, breathes,
and seeks to transmit—through its
curriculum, research, and professors
—a Weltanschauung grounded in a
great tradition.
This means more than a presentation of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university’s curriculum and
lip service to that tradition in the faculty’s scholarly activities. A Catholic
vision can be relished, deepened, and
communicated only by giving it more
than equal time in a marketplace of
competing opinions. One could expect
as much—though this does not, admittedly, always occur—from a university
faithful to the liberal tradition of openness to all points of view. For its part, a
Catholic university is the responsible
bearer of a vision and tradition that can
enrich the wider academic and social
communities, which look to it to be
distinctive.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, the rise of a new spirit of
international cooperation promoted
the internationalization of higher education. As the need to establish worldwide contacts and a global perspective
became increasingly apparent, student
and faculty exchanges, research collaboration, foreign language, and area
study programs expanded rapidly.1
The first steps of overcoming a deeprooted American academic isolationism
—always out of step with a Church
that treasures universality—have already
been taken in many universities. This
is good news. But a fresh challenge
still lies ahead. How can Catholic colleges and universities in the United
States practically foster not just academic inter- nationalization but a cul-

ture of global educational solidarity?
The current situation is complex.
On the one hand, globalization enables
faculty and students to work and study
anywhere and, through technology, to
bring some measure of equal access to
information by all institutions. On the
other hand, in many ways the process
of globalization also reinforces existing
educational inequality.2 The, universities that are reaping the lions share of
the benefits of an information-based
economy are those from developed
countries. They have the resources to
invest in costly information networks
and, through their centers of research,
to create new knowledge, over which
they enjoy a near monopoly.
The other universities, including
most of those in developing countries,
although they benefit from this communications revolution, remain consumers of the new technology.3 In
many ways, then, the process of globalization is serving to widen the gap
between “have” and “have not” academic institutions. This process has
become an instrument for “a new
version of colonialism.”4
The Catholic university, with its
vision founded on the Gospel, offers a
way to close the gap. Take, for example, the parable of the Good Samaritan
(cf. Lk 10:25-37) and apply it to the
Catholic Academy in the United States.
This parable leaves no doubt, writes
Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est,
that “anyone who needs me, and whom
I can help, is my neighbor. The concept of ‘neighbor’ is now universalized, yet it remains concrete.”5 Concern for our neighbor—and here every
Catholic university should think specifically of its academic neighbors—“transcends the confines of national communities and has increasingly broadened
its horizon to the whole world.”6
While the Holy Father refrains from
drawing any concrete implications for
the world of higher education, he opens
the door for us to ask: Where is my
neighbor university? How do educational institutions at the service of the
whole Church and committed to the

Gospel, give practical expression to being Good Academic Samaritans? What
can American Catholic universities do
to mitigate the chronic discrepancies
in the quality of higher education that
mar the universal Church? For the Vatican, the unevenness of the resources
available to Church-sponsored institutions in the one Body remains a
matter of the gravest concern.
In a joint statement recently issued
by the Congregation for Catholic Education and the International Federation of Catholic Universities, the Holy
See called for an increased exchange
of educational resources by institutions
of the first world with those from developing regions: “In the light of the
mission of the university to serve, this
educational divide can be an opportunity and an avenue where this mandate for service can be realized.”7 The
global educational gap in Catholic institutions, evident sometimes even among
universities sponsored by the same religious institute, can be overcome only
by heightened cooperative efforts.
In the United States, there is enormous pressure for universities to be
recognized as first-class institutions,
ranked according to criteria which allot
no points for initiatives on behalf of
educational solidarity. Given this situation, what imaginative and courageous
steps can be taken to create partnerships with institutions in the emerging
nations? In those countries, especially
in Africa, the need for Catholic higher
education has never been more evident.
In truth, Church-related colleges and
universities are key to these countries’
future integral human, economic, and
cultural development.
Certainly no silver-bullet solutions are available. Nonetheless, a
true mark of a university’s catholicity is the extent to which it takes to
heart the need to tithe its own academic and financial resources so as
to help build up systems of Catholic
higher education in the local
churches of developing countries.
Collaboration is a concrete expression of educational solidarity and
ecclesial communion.

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Such cooperation should become a
distinguishing trait of all Catholic colleges and universities in the United
States. What they must bring to others
is an educational vision inspired by a
courageous and unwavering fidelity to
the principles and practices proposed
by Ex Corde Ecclesiae. To begin the
laborious task of closing the educational divide, the Holy See calls for
effective solidarity, an exchange of
academic gifts and resources, between
wealthy and successful institutions and
those still on the road to development.
Endnotes
1 Cf. Congregation for Catholic Education and
the International Federation of Catholic Universities, Globalization and Catholic Higher Education:
Working Document (Vatican City: Vatican Press,
2004), Part One, II, 13.
2 Cf. Philip G. Altbach, “Globalization and the
University: Myths and Realities in an Unequal
World,” Seminarium 42:3-4 (2002), 811-813.
3 Cf. Congregation for Catholic Education and
the International Federation of Catholic Universities, Globalization and Catholic Higher Education:
Working Document (Vatican City: Vatican Press,
2004), Part One, II, 13-14.
4 John Paul II, Address to the Pontifical Academy
of Social Sciences (27 April 2001), 4: L’Osservatore
Romano, English edition, 18 (2 May 2001), 7.
5 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 15.
6 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 30.
7 Congregation for Catholic Education and the
International Federation of Catholic Universities,
Globalization and Catholic Higher Education: Working Document (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2004),
19. See the major publications of the conference,
held from 2-6 December 2002 in Rome, in the
special volume dedicated to this theme in the
Congregation for Catholic Education’s journal,
Seminarium, 42:3-4 (2002).
Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, is the
Secretary of Catholic Education (for Seminaries
and Institutes of Study) of the Holy See.
This excerpt is from an address given at Boston
College on September 11, 2006. Reprinted
with permission of the author.

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17

A Vocation for Catholic Higher Education?
by stephen pope

T

uition, room, and board for
many Catholic universities
runs on average between
$40,000 and $45,000 per year. The
cost of tuition continues to rise faster
than both income and inflation. Add
transportation, books, fees, and other
miscellaneous expenses, and the total
cost of a four-year bachelor’s degree
often tops the $180,000 mark at the
most prestigious schools. About 60
percent of students at all private fouryear institutions receive some form
of financial aid, and about half of all
students are forced to borrow to meet
expenses. The steep debt incurred
over the course of four years typically
requires many times that number of
years of repayment. Given this expense,
many fear that in the years to come
only the most affluent may be able
to afford a Catholic college education.
This cost should be placed in the
context of the growing income inequality between the rich and poor in our
society. On June 19, 1996, the United
States Census Bureau reported that
since 1968 the average income of
households in the bottom 20 percent
of earners rose a mere 0.8 percent
(from $7,702 to $7,762), while the average income of the top 20 percent of
earners rose a staggering 44 percent
(from $73,754 to $105,945). The economic value of a college degree continues to rise as the widening income
gap between those with and those without a degree demonstrates. College,
more than ever, is a long-term financial
investment that, on average, pays substantial economic dividends. But the
rising cost of this education, coupled
with the economic benefits that it
yields, raises questions about the relation of Catholic universities to the poor
and less affluent.
Add to this combination of the escalating costs of education and the
rising income inequality in our society
the danger of increasingly isolating
college students from the poor and
making them less sensitive to poor
people’s proper worth and rightful
claims. Catholic higher education
should not become simply one more
familiar route for the recycling of the

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upper middle class, in essence no different from other private universities.
Catholic universities cannot simply be
places where well-to-do students receive
a good education in order to assume
their place in the next generation
of corporate and professional elites.
How does education of the relatively
affluent (and sometimes the absolutely
rich) relate to concern for those on
the other end of the social and economic spectrum?
Two theologians, Jon Sobrino and
John Henry Newman, have something
to say about the inevitable tensions underlying this question. According to

world. Sobrino believes that speaking
the truth is the best remedy for social
injustice. Above all, knowledge must
be put at the service of the poor. Only
in this way is the Catholic university’s
true catholicity affirmed—that is, its
openness to the worth of all people and
not just the economic elite.
The Catholic university cannot
therefore be understood in Sobrino’s
analysis as the scene of “value-free,”
politically neutral intellectual activity.
It should be conceived Christocentrically—in light of the Cross and as an
expression of Jesus’ uncompromising
love for the poor. Sobrino poses to the

Institutions of higher education that are
at once true universities and genuinely
Catholic must be characterized in terms
of both an “enlargement of heart” and
an “enlargement of mind.”
Jon Sobrino of San Salvador’s Central
American University, compassion must
have the central place in the life of the
Catholic university. College students
and universities themselves must learn
to embrace the “preferential option
for the poor.” Sobrino argues that if
the Catholic university is to exist in
a world of massive suffering and not
function simply as an “ivory tower,”
it must be committed to the poor.
Far from paternalistic philanthropy,
the preferential option entails solidarity—identifying with the poor, being
converted by them, and participating
in movements for their empowerment.
If the Catholic university does not actively side with the poor in appropriate
ways, it will tacitly side with the status
quo and reinforce present structures
of injustice, oppression, and exclusion.
The university is a place where students and faculty search for the truth,
make discoveries, and communicate
findings and insights to the wider

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Catholic university the question: “What
can we do to take the crucified people
down from their crosses?” Whereas
knowledge has all too frequently been
used to support oppression, it ought
now to be put at the service of the
poor and for the eradication of their
suffering. Not only theology and philosophy, but also political science,
sociology, and other disciplines can
be taught in a way that gives centrality to the needs of the poor.
Perhaps the strongest challenge
to Sobrino’s position is found in John
Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. In his fifth discourse, Newman
examined the question of the utility
value of a college education (something
a lot of undergraduates wonder about
during final exams week). Human beings
naturally desire to know and the principal virtue of the university lies in
its service of this need rather than any
other. In contrast to even the most
learned and intellectually demanding

training in the professions and business, liberal education in the true sense
of the term is not intended to serve
what is beyond itself. This is not to say
that it is a good thing for college graduates to be driving cabs or bartending,
only that the most important feature of
college is how it expands the mind, not
the wallet. It is both true and good that
higher education and knowledge also
provide career opportunities and financial advantages, but these benefits are
not the primary objectives of education.
But what about compassion? Newman regarded knowledge as valuable
in itself whether or not its discovery
is either justified directly by utility or,
by implication, motivated by compassion. “Knowledge is one thing, virtue
is another; good sense is not conscience, refinement is not humility,
nor is largess and justness of view
faith. Liberal education makes not
the Christian, not the Catholic, but
the gentleman.” By “gentleman,” Newman meant not a polite person with refined sensibilities, but rather one who
has a “philosophic habit of mind” and
“a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste,
a candid, equitable, dispassionate
mind, a noble and courteous bearing
in the conduct of life...the connatural
qualities of a large knowledge.” This
“enlargement of mind” continues to
be a powerful antidote to bigotry,
apathy, and social myopia.
Though a creature of his time, Newman provides a helpful corrective to
the danger of an exclusive focus on what
Sobrino sees as central, compassion.
Insisting that the search for knowledge
be motivated primarily by compassion amounts to a drastic elimination
of one of the most fundamental features of what makes us human. The
university ought to be a place where
students come to greater understanding
of things, worth knowing for their own
sakes, a place where the love of learning
is not supplanted by other objectives,
however legitimate in themselves, and
where knowledge is not instrumentalized to other values.
Yet, upholding the intrinsic value of
the “enlargement of mind” need not be
at odds with acknowledging the place
of compassion in the life of an educated

Catholic. Catholic higher education
includes not only intellectual development, but also the further cultivation
of those traits that are characteristically Catholic and Christian, including
love of God and love of neighbor. If
this is true, then we need to recognize
that the well-spoken and prosperous
professional who makes substantial
financial contributions to university
development funds but is utterly indifferent to the suffering of the poor
should not be taken as a model graduate of a Catholic university. Catholic
universities have certainly generated
those who fit this image, but we ought
to recognize this for what it is—a university’s success in financial and social
terms but not an exemplar of its core
ideals. Sobrino is fundamentally correct on this score. The credibility of
the Catholic university lies neither in
its endowment, nor in its graduation
rate, nor in the power and status of
its alumni, but in whether its graduates are genuinely concerned about
“taking the crucified people down
from their crosses.”
Most people will agree that to
graduate from a Catholic university
and somehow not to have significantly enhanced one’s ability to think
more deeply about the world, one’s
nature, and one’s identity is to have
“missed the point” of college. We
should regard compassion in an analogous way, recognizing that to graduate from a Catholic college without
a more developed awareness of the
needs of the poor and one’s own
social responsibility to them is also
really to have “missed the point.”
Institutions of higher education that
are at once true universities and
genuinely Catholic must be characterized in terms of both an “enlargement of heart” and an “enlargement
of mind.”
Stephen Pope is a Professor of Theology at
Boston College.
Reprinted with permission of the author from
the March 28, 1997 issue of Commonweal.

—

Catholic Influences on the
Human Rights Project
by mary ann glendon

I

f you are like most Americans, and
like me before I got interested in
the Universal Declaration, you
probably do not stay up nights thinking
about the United Nations and its various pronouncements. So let me begin
with a little background on the Universal Declaration, and why it seemed to
me to be worth studying. During World
War II, the idea began to percolate that
there should be some kind of international bill of rights—a common standard
to which all nations could aspire—and
by which they could measure their own
and each other’s progress.
One of the first suggestions came
from Pope Pius XII, who called in a
June 1941 radio address for an international bill recognizing the rights that
flowed from the dignity of the person.1
Another came from the British writer
H.G. Wells in a little pamphlet subtitled “What Are We Fighting For?”2 But
in practical terms, the most consequential support came from several Latin
American countries, who comprised
twenty-one of the original fifty-five
member nations of the UN when it
was founded in 1945.
It was largely due to the insistence
of the Latin Americans, joined by other
small nations, that the UN established
a Human Rights Commission, composed of members from eighteen different countries. It was chaired by
Eleanor Roosevelt, who was just then
making a new life for herself after the
death of her husband.
When the Human Rights Commission set to work in early 1947, its
first major task was to draft a “bill of
rights” to which persons of all nations
and cultures could subscribe. But that
assignment rested upon a couple of
problematic assumptions: no one
really knew whether there were any
such common principles, or what they
might be. So UNESCO asked a
group of philosophers—some well
known in the West, like Jacques Maritain, and others from Confucian,
Hindu, and Muslim countries—to
examine the question. These philoso-

phers sent a questionnaire to still
more leading thinkers all over the
world, from Mahatma Gandhi to Teilhard de Chardin, and in due course
they reported that, somewhat to their
surprise, they had found that there
were a few common standards of
decency that were widely shared, though
not always formulated in the language
of rights. Their conclusion was that
this practical consensus was enough
to enable the project to go forward.
The judgment of the philosophers
was borne out by the experience of the
delegates on the Human Rights Commission. This group, too, was highly
diverse, but they had few disagreements
over the content of the Declaration.
Their disputes were chiefly political,
and chiefly involved the Soviet Union
and the United States hurling accusations of hypocrisy against each other.
On December 10, 1948, the document was adopted by the UN General
Assembly as a “common standard of
achievement.” There were no dissenting votes, although the Soviet bloc,
Saudi Arabia, and South Africa recorded
abstentions. The Declaration quickly
became the principal inspiration of the
postwar international human rights
movement; the model for the majority
of rights instruments in the world—
over ninety in all—and it serves today
as the single most important reference
point for discussions of human rights
in international settings.
But the more the human rights
idea caught on, the fiercer became
the contests over the meanings of the
provisions of the Declaration. So, after
returning from the Beijing Women’s
Conference, I decided to read up a bit
on the original understanding of the
Declaration. I expected to just go to the
library and check out a book or two.
But to my surprise, there were no histories of the framing at that time, apart
from three doctoral theses, all done
at European universities. So I began to
read the primary sources myself.
It did not take long to realize that
the framers of the UDHR (Universal
Declaration of Human Rights), like

legal drafters everywhere, had done a
good deal of copying. They drew many
provisions from existing constitutions
and rights instruments that the staff of
the UN Human Rights Division had
collected from all over the world. They
relied most heavily of all on two draft
proposals for international bills that
were themselves based on extensive
cross-national research. One of these
proposals was prepared under the auspices of the American Law Institute,
and the other was a Latin American
document that became the 1948 Bogotá
Declaration of the Rights and Duties
of Man.
The final draft produced by Mrs.
Roosevelt’s commission was a synthesis
drawn from many sources—and thus
a document that differed in many ways
from our familiar Anglo-American rights
instruments—most noticeably in its
inclusion of social and economic rights,
and in its express acknowledgment
that rights are subject to duties and
limitations. It also differed from socialist charters, notably with its strong
emphasis on political and civil liberties.
Several features of the Declaration
set it apart from both Anglo-American
and Soviet bloc documents. Consider
the following: its pervasive emphasis on
the “inherent dignity” and “worth of
the human person”; the affirmation that
the human person is “endowed with
reason and conscience”; the right to
form trade unions; the worker’s right to
just remuneration for himself and his
family; the recognition of the family as
the “natural and fundamental group unit
of society,” entitled as such to “protection by society and the state”; the prior
right of parents to choose the education of their children; and a provision
that motherhood and childhood are
entitled to “special care and assistance.”3
Where did those ideas come
from? The immediate source was
the twentieth-century constitutions
of many Latin American and continental European countries. But where did
the Latin Americans and continental
Europeans get them? The proximate
answer to that question is: mainly
from the programs of political parties,
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Catholic Influences on the Human Rights Project
Continued from Page 19

parties of a type that did not exist in
the United States, Britain, or the
Soviet bloc, namely, Christian Democratic and Christian Social parties.
But where did the politicians get
their ideas about the family, work, civil
society, and the dignity of the person?
The answer to that is: mainly from
the social encyclicals Rerum Novarum
(1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931).
And where did the Church get them?
The short answer is that those encyclicals were part of the process through
which the Church had begun to reflect
on the Enlightenment, the eighteenthcentury revolutions, socialism, and the
labor question in the light of Scripture,
tradition, and her own experience as
an “expert in humanity.”4
The most articulate advocate of this
whole complex of ideas on the Human
Rights Commission was a Lebanese
Arab of the Orthodox faith, Charles
Malik. In reading the old UN transcripts, was struck by Malik’s frequent
use of terms like the “intermediate
associations” of civil society, and by
his emphatic preference for the term
“person” rather than “individual.”
When I had the opportunity to meet
Charles Malik’s son, Dr. Habib Malik,
I asked Dr. Malik if he knew where
his father had acquired that vocabulary. The answer was: from the heavily
underlined copies of Rerum Novarum
and Quadragesimo Anno which Malik
kept among the books he most frequently consulted. Charles Malik
thus seems to have been one of the
first of an impressive line of nonCatholic intellectuals who found a
treasure-trove of ideas in Catholic
social teaching.
The most zealous promoters of
social and economic rights, contrary
to what is now widely supposed, were
not the Soviet bloc representatives,
but delegates from the Latin American countries. Except for the Mexican
delegates, most of these people were
inspired not by Marx and Engels
buy by Leo XIII and Pius XI. Their
focus was not on the exploitation of
man by man, but on the dignity of
workers and the preferential option
for the poor.
I think I have said enough to show

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that the contributions of Catholic
social thought to the Universal Declaration were far from insignificant. But
to avoid any misunderstanding, let me
emphasize again that this was just one
of many sources of influence on that
impressively multicultural document.
Now I would like to turn to a
consideration of some of the ways in
which that influence was reciprocated.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE UNIVERSAL
HUMAN RIGHTS IDEA ON CATHOLICISM

Here the trail is harder to follow,
but I believe it begins in Paris in 1948
when the Human Rights Commissioners were trying to round up support
from as many nations as possible for
the final vote on the Declaration in
the UN General Assembly. A key figure in that lobbying process was the
French member of the Commission,
René Cassin. Cassin was a distinguished
French lawyer who described himself
as a secular Jew. He had lost twentynine relatives in concentration camps,
and was later to win the Nobel Peace
Prize for his human rights activities.
There is an intriguing sentence in
Cassin’s memoirs where he says that
in the fall of 1948 he was aided on several occasions by the “discreet personal
encouragements” of the Papal Nuncio
in Paris.5 That Nuncio was none other
than Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope
John XXIII.
Roncalli’s subsequent actions suggest that events in the UN that fall
must have made a great impression on
him. It also seems clear that he must
have agreed with Maritain and other
Catholic thinkers that there was value
in discussing certain human goods as
rights, even though the biblical tradition uses the language of obligation.
In Pacem in Terris, John XXIII referred to the Universal Declaration by
name and called it “an act of the highest importance.”6
Many Catholics were surprised, and
some were even shocked, at the extent
to which the documents of Vatican II,
and John XXIII’s encyclicals Pacem in
Terris and Mater et Magistra, seemed
to reflect a shift from natural law to
human rights.”7 Some writers regard
this shift as mainly rhetorical, an effort

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on the part of the Church to make her
teachings intelligible to “all men and
women of good will.”8
But I believe it was more than that.
I would say it was also part of the
Church’s shift from nature to history,
as well as her increasing openness to
learning from other traditions. The
Church has always taught, with St.
Paul, that our knowledge of truth in
this life is imperfect; that “now we see
only as in a mirror dimly.” But she has
not always been so forceful as John
Paul II was in Centesimus Annus when
he insisted that Christian believers are
obliged to remain open to discover
“every fragment of truth...in the life
experience and in the culture of individuals and nations.”9 A hallmark of
the thought of John Paul II has been
his sense of being in partnership with
all of humanity in a shared quest for
a better apprehension of truth.
With hindsight, we can see that
Vatican II only marked the beginning
of the Church’s appropriation of modern rights discourse.10 As one of the
younger Council Fathers, Bishop Karol
Wojtyla from Krakow shared John
XXIII’s appreciation of the postwar
human rights project. John Paul II
repeatedly praised the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calling it
“one of the highest expressions of the
human conscience of our time” and
“a real milestone on the path of the
moral progress of humanity.”11
Needless to say, the Church’s adoption of rights language entailed the
need to be very clear about the fact
that she does not always use that terminology in the same way it is used in
secular circles. Those who think the
Church should never have gone down
that road at all often fail to notice two
important facts about the Church’s use
of rights language. First, the rights tradition into which the Church has
tapped is the biblically informed, continental, dignitarian tradition which
she herself had already done so much
to shape. “The Catholic doctrine of
human rights,” Avery Dulles points
out, “is not based on Locke, an empiricism, or individualism. It has a more
ancient and distinguished pedigree.”12
Second, the Church did not even

uncritically adopt the dignitarian
vision. In Gaudium et Spes, the Council Fathers say that the movement to
respect human rights “must be imbued with the spirit of the Gospel
and be protected from all appearance
of mistaken autonomy. We are tempted to consider our personal rights as
fully protected only when we are free
from every norm of divine law; but
following this road leads to the destruction rather than to the maintenance of the dignity of the human
person.”13 In the same vein, John
XXIII noted in Pacem in Terris that
everything the Church says about
human rights is conditioned by their
foundation in the dignity that attaches
to the person made in the image and
likeness of God, and everything is oriented to the end of the common good.
And when John Paul II sent his good
wishes to the UN on the occasion of
the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration in 1998, he challenged the assembly with these words: “Inspired by the
example of all those who have taken
the risk of freedom, can we not recommit ourselves also to taking the
risk of solidarity—and thus the risk
of peace?”14
Some of the most striking interactions between Catholic social thought
and human rights have occurred in the
field of international advocacy. With
over 300,000 educational, health care,
and relief agencies serving mainly the
world’s poorest inhabitants, the Church
has become an outspoken advocate
of social justice in international settings. But it is a hard sell. Challenging passages like this one from the
1997 World Day of Peace message
do not sit particularly well with
affluent nations and first-world
interest groups:
Living out [the] demanding commitment [to solidarity] requires a
total reversal of the alleged values
which make people seek only their
own good: power, pleasure, the unscrupulous accumulation of wealth
....A society of genuine solidarity can
be built only if the well-off, in helping
the poor, do not stop at giving from
what they do not need. Those living
in poverty can wait no longer. They
need help now, and so have a right
to receive immediately what they

need [emphasis supplied].
At first glance, words like “a right to
receive what one needs” sound uncomfortably like simplistic, secular social
advocacy. But the Church’s use of rights
language in this context cannot be equated with crude mandates for staterun social engineering programs. For
one thing, the Church has always refrained from proposing specific models:
her gift to political science has been,
rather, the principle of subsidiarity—
which is steadily attracting interest in
the secular world.
Moreover, the Church teaches solidarity not as a policy, but as a Virtue—a
virtue which inclines us to overcome
sources of division within ourselves and
within society. Like any other virtue,
solidarity requires constant practice; it
is inseparable from personal reform.
The Church’s advocacy for the preferential option for the poor has led
her to become a staunch defender of
the Universal Declaration as an integrated whole. While most nations take
a selective approach to human rights,
the Holy See consistently lifts up the
original vision of the Declaration—a
vision in which political and civil rights
are indispensable for social and economic justice, and vice versa. At a time
when affluent nations seem increasingly to be washing their hands of poor
countries and peoples, it is often the
Holy See, and only the Holy See, that
keeps striving to bring together the
two halves of the divided soul of the
human rights project—its resounding
affirmation of freedom and its insistence on one human family for which
all bear a common responsibility.
As for the future, I believe the
dialogue between Catholicism and
the human rights tradition will continue, and that it will be beneficial to
both. One may even imagine that the
resources of the Catholic tradition
may be helpful in resolving several
thorny dilemmas that have bedeviled
the human rights project from its outset, especially the dilemmas arising
from challenges to its universality and
its truth claims. A fuller exposition of
that point would require another lecture, but let me briefly sketch some ways
in which Catholic thinkers might be
helpful with regard to these problems.
Take for example the dilemma of
how there can be universal rights in

view of the diversity among cultures
which has recently resurfaced with
a vengeance. A number of Asian and
Islamic leaders (unlike the Asian and
Islamic representatives on the original
Human Rights Commission) take the
position that all rights are culturally
relative. They claim that so-called universal rights are really just instruments
of Western cultural imperialism.
The long Catholic experience in
the dialectic between the core teachings of the faith and the various cultural settings in which the faith has
been received helps us to see that
to accept universal principles does
not mean accepting that they must be
brought to life in the same way everywhere. The experience of Catholicism,
with the enculturation of its basic
teachings, shows that universality need
not entail homogeneity. In fact, the
whole Church has been enriched by
the variety of ways in which the faith
has been expressed around the world.
The framers of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had similar
expectations for the relatively short list
of rights that they deemed fundamental. Their writings reveal that they
contemplated a legitimate pluralism in
forms of freedom, a variety of means
of protecting basic rights, and different
ways of resolving the tensions among
rights, provided that no rights were
completely subordinated to others. As
Jacques Maritain put it, there can be
many different kinds of music played
on the Declaration’s thirty strings.

Hannah Arendt has warned that “The
ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not
the convinced Nazi or the convinced
Communist, but people for whom the
distinction between fact and fiction...
and the distinction between true and
false...no longer exist.”15
At a time when much of the postmodern secular academy seems to have
given up on reason and the search for
truth, it is heartening to read the spirited defense of reason in the encyclical
Fides et Ratio. The “reason” that the
Church defends is not the calculating
reason of Hobbes, in the service of
the passions, nor is it narrow scientific
rationalism. It is the dynamic, recurrent, and potentially self-correcting
process of experiencing, understanding,
and judging that has animated her best
theologians from Thomas Aquinas to
Bernard Lonergan.
Endnotes

It seems unfortunate that that pluralist understanding has been almost
completely forgotten, even by friends
of the human rights project. For the
more that Western groups promote a
top-down, homogenizing vision of
human rights, the more credibility
they add to the charge of Western
cultural imperialism.
Another dilemma for the human
rights project is the challenge of historicism and relativism. If there are
no common truths to which all men
and women can appeal, then there
are no human rights, and there is little
hope that reason and choice can prevail
over force and accident in the realm
of human affairs. It is one thing to
acknowledge that the human mind
can glimpse truth only as through
a glass darkly, and quite another to
deny the existence of truth altogether.

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21

Infinite Wonder of the Divine
How Creationist Notions of Intelligent Design Diminish God
by george coyne, s.j.

W

ill the universe ever end?
Can we rely on it to continue on and on? The
most recent measurements of the velocities of recession of very distant objects
in the universe, supernovae, which
can serve as standard “light beacons”
at distances of about 10 to 12 billion
light years from us, indicate that the
universe is not only still expanding
but that it is accelerating in its expansion and will, unless we discover
a braking mechanism, expand forever—an empirically infinite universe.
Several important issues need to be
explained here. To measure such large
distances, we must use probes that are
so distant that we cannot experiment
upon them. We can only observe them
and, in fact, we are limited very much
by what we can observe. An astronomer
is like the poor old fellow who, while
making his way home in the dark and
a bit tipsy, loses his watch. While he is
searching for it under a lamppost, a
gallant policeman comes along and
inquires about his activity. He explains
that he is looking for his watch. “Well,”
says the cop, “did you lose it here?”
“Oh no,” says he, “but it’s so dark all
around that this is the only place with
light enough that I could possibly find
it.” As you will see, to measure the age
of the universe, astronomers must cleverly, and hopefully more soberly than
the gentleman searching for his watch,
probe where there is light and even
then, since light travels with a finite
velocity, we are seeing the universe
only as it was, not as it is. “Light beacons” are celestial objects that have the
same intrinsic brightness wherever they
are in the universe and can, therefore,
serve as distance indicators.
Do a simple experiment. Measure
the brightness of the lamp sitting on
your desk. Now go to the next room,
four times farther away from the lamp,
and measure its brightness. It will be
one-sixteenth as bright (diminished by
the inverse square of the distance).
Now reverse the experiment. You know
the intrinsic brightness of the lamp, as
cosmologists do that of supernovae, and
you know how bright it appeals to you

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from the next room, as cosmologists
do by measuring the apparent brightness of supernovae.You can, therefore,
deduce the distance.
So, if we measure the distance and
brightness of objects at increasingly
larger distances in the universe, we can
establish the curve of expansion of the
universe and thereby deduce its age. Let
me explain. What we are measuring is
how fast all objects, outside our suncentered system, are moving away from
one another at various epochs in the

clusters of galaxies of all types, quasars,
and supernovae. It is so universally true
that we intuitively surmise that it is saying something fundamental about the
universe itself. And it is. It is telling us
that the universe is expanding uniformly. But there is even more to the story.
There are several kinds of supernovae. Astronomers have found that
the type about which I am speaking
can serve as a light beacon despite its
very strange and unstable energy
source. These supernovae are binary

The universe is not God
and it cannot exist independently of God.
God is working with the universe.
history of the universe. At one time,
not long after the Big Bang, all of these
objects were “together.” So we can extrapolate backwards to the time when
they began to separate and, thereby,
measure the age of the universe, 13.7
billion years.
This is a simple calculation like the
following analogous one. Suppose I run
a marathon at a constant rate of 4 miles
per hour. You are standing at the 20mile marker with clock in hand. It is
easy for you, knowing my rate and that
you are at 20 miles from the beginning,
to calculate when I began.
Using this simple calculation, in
1929 Edwin Hubble discovered the
observational relationship that bears his
name, “the Hubble Law,” and made the
first calculation of the age of the universe from its expansion. He found for
24 galaxies that their velocities of recession were directly proportional to
their distances. He later extended the
measurements to more galaxies at larger
distances. A modern version of these
pioneering observations confirms the
Hubble Law but with much greater
accuracy. In the entire history of observational astronomy this is a remarkable
correlation. It holds true for all extragalactic objects: galaxies of all types,

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stars in which a white dwarf, a dead
star whose mass is very compact so
that it has a very large gravity field,
sucks matter from its companion giant
star. It becomes suddenly millions of
times brighter by starting a thermonuclear furnace in its atmosphere from
the matter accumulated. This is obviously a very unstable event and lasts
for only hundreds of days (the stars
involved are about 10 billion years old).
Nonetheless, we have found that the
maximum brightness that it attains can
be an excellent light beacon and indicator of distance as I have explained
above. By measuring these distances
and the velocity of these supernovae,
we find that the universe is accelerating in its expansion. This result causes
a great deal of head scratching among
cosmologists because it defies the law
of gravity. Matter in the universe should
be constantly drawing the universe in
and braking its expansion. What is
pushing the universe out, so to speak,
against the force of gravity so that it is
accelerating? Despite such problems
as this, we now know that, since it is
accelerating, the universe will expand
forever and eventually reach the temperature of absolute zero so that everything in the universe will be dead.
There will be no energy. The universe will in this sense be dead but

expanding infinitely.
To appreciate the current age of the
universe and its temporal infinitude, we
must compare it to the times at which
other events, such as the appearance of
life, have occurred. To do this, I suggest
that the actual age of the universe, 13.7
billion years, for which we have no sensation, be reduced in our imagination
to one Earth year, one rotation of the
Earth about the sun. The following
calendar results:

I January: The Big Bang
7 February: The Milky Way is born
14 August: The Earth is born
4 September: First life on the Earth
15 December: The Cambrian explosion
25 December: The dinosaurs appear
30 December: Extinction of the dinosaurs
31 December
19.00.00: First human ancestors
23.58.00: First humans
23.59.30: Age of Agriculture
23.59.47: The pyramids
23.59.58: Jesus Christ is born
23.59.59: Galileo is born
24.00.00: Today

We see that the dinosaurs, although
having the good fortune to have been
born on Christmas Day, only lived for
five days. It took 60 percent of the age
of the universe for the first life to appear on the Earth, but once the Earth
was formed, it took only 21 days or
about 6 percent of the age of the universe for life to appear, but then it took
about 3 months for the first humans.
However, the last day of the year provides startling news. Jesus Christ was
born only two seconds before the end
of the year and Galileo one second.
We now have some idea of where we
humans stand with respect to the age
of the universe.
In the course of the aging of the
universe, the human person has come
to be through the process of physical,
chemical, and biological evolution. As
to the evolutionary process, I offer the
following brief considerations.
Why did it take 60 percent of the
age of the universe for life to begin?

How did we humans come to be in
this evolving universe? It is quite clear
that we do not know everything about
this process. But it would be scientifically absurd to deny that the human
brain is a result of a chemical complexification in an evolving universe.
After the universe became rich in certain basic chemicals through the birth
and death of stars, those chemicals got
together in successive steps to make
ever more complex molecules. Finally,
in some extraordinary chemical process,
the human brain came to be the most
complicated machine that we know.
Did all of this happen by chance
or by necessity in this evolving universe? Was it destined to happen?
The first thing to be said is that the
problem is not formulated correctly.
It is not just a question of chance or
necessity because, first of all, it is
both. Furthermore, there is a third
element here that is very important.
It is what I call “fertility.” What this
means is that the universe is so prolific
in offering the opportunity for the
success of both chance and necessary

processes that such character of the
universe must be included in the discussion. The universe is 13.7 billion
years old, it contains about 100 trillion galaxies, each of which contains
100 billion stars of an immense variety. Thus, it is the combination of
chance and necessary processes in a
fertile universe that best explains the
universe as seen by science. When we
combine these three elements—chance,
necessity, and the fertility of the universe—we see clearly that evolution,
as many hold, is not simply a random,
blind process. It has a direction and
an intrinsic destiny. By intrinsic, I
mean that science need not, and in
fact cannot methodologically, invoke
a designer as those arguing for intelligent design attempt to do.
How are we to interpret this scientific picture of life’s origins in terms of
religious belief? Do we need God to
explain this? Very succinctly, my answer
is no. In fact, to need God would be a
very denial of God. God is not the response to a need. One gets the impression from certain religious believers

that they fondly hope for the durability of certain gaps in our scientific
knowledge of evolution, so that they
can fill them with God. This is the
exact opposite of what human intelligence is all about. We should be seeking for the fullness of God in creation.
We should not need God, we should
accept him when he comes to us.
But the personal God I have described is also God, creator of the
universe. It is unfortunate that,
especially in America, creationism has
come to mean some fundamentalistic,
literal, scientific interpretation of
Genesis. Judaic-Christian faith is
radically creationist, but in a totally
different sense. It is rooted in a belief
that everything depends upon God,
or better, all is a gift from God. The
universe is not God and it cannot
exist independently of God. Neither
pantheism nor naturalism is true.
God is working with the universe.
The universe has a certain vitality of
its own like a child does. It has the
ability to respond to words of endearment and encouragement. You disci-

pline a child but you try to preserve
and enrich the individual character of
the child and its own passion for life.
A parent must allow the child to grow
into adulthood, to come to make its
own choices, to go on its own way in
life. Words that give life are richer
than mere commands or information.
In such wise ways does God deal
with the universe—the infinite, everexpanding universe. That is why, it
seems to me, that the Intelligent
Design Movement, a largely American
phenomenon, diminishes God, makes
him a designer rather than a lover.
George Coyne, S.J., served for many years as
the Director of the Vatican Observatory.
Reprinted with permission from The Tablet,
December 10, 2005.

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American Catholics and the State
by gregory a. kalscheur

A

s John Courtney Murray recognized in 1960, the American
mind “has never been clear
about the relation between morals and
law.” Murray’s critical contribution to
our current need for more nuanced
thinking lies in his efforts to bring clarity to our understanding of that essential relationship. He explained that our
confusion about the relation between
law and morality often stems from our
failure to understand that legal prohibitions are not capable of dealing with
every sort of moral evil.
Invoking traditional rules of
jurisprudence, Murray explained that
the lawmaker must engage in a “subtle discipline, at once a science and an
art, that mediates between the imperatives of the moral order and the commands or prohibitions of the civil law.”
The “subtle discipline” of jurisprudence reminds us that there is a difference between sin and crime.
Morality (which governs all of human conduct) and law (which gov-

erns the public order of society) are
not coextensive in their functions.
Legal prohibitions can have only a
limited effect on shaping moral character. Accordingly, Murray argued
that people can “be coerced only to
a minimal amount of moral action.”
Indeed, “the moral aspirations of the
law are minimal.”
If society wishes to elevate and maintain moral standards above the minimal
level required for the healthy functioning of the social order, it must look
to institutions other than the law. The
state and law, therefore, have a necessary—but a necessarily limited—role
to play in society’s work of establishing
and maintaining the common good.
Murray insisted that law and morality are essentially related, but necessarily differentiated. Because the coercive
force of the state ultimately lies behind
the law, the law must not moralize
excessively. If it does so, “it tends to
defeat even its own modest aims, by
bringing itself into contempt.”
The law, therefore, should not be

used to prohibit a given moral evil
unless that prohibition can be shown
to be something that the law is capable
of addressing prudently. John Courtney Murray, following St. Thomas
Aquinas, argued that human law must
be framed with a view to the level of
virtue that it is actually possible to
expect from the people required to
comply with the law. Accordingly,
Murray suggested a series of questions that the legislator must consider in assessing the prudence of a
proposed law: Will the prohibition
be obeyed, at least by most people?
Is it enforceable against the disobedient? Is it prudent to enforce this
ban, given the possibility of harmful effects in other areas of social
life? Is the instrumentality of a coercive law a good means for the eradication of the targeted social evil?
And since a law that usually fails is
not a good means, what are the lessons
of experience with this sort of legal
prohibition? If legislation is to be
properly crafted—from a moral
point of view and with the goal of
promoting the common good of society—“these are the questions that

jurisprudence must answer.”
In light of all these considerations,
society should not expect a great deal
of moral improvement from legal prohibitions. Instead, the limited effectiveness of legal coercion compelling
obedience through fear of punishment
as a vehicle toward genuine moral
reform means that the legal prohibitions must be used with caution in
a free society. As Murray explained:
[A] human society is inhumanly ruled
when it is ruled only, or mostly, by
fear. Good laws are obeyed by the
generality because they are good
laws; they merit and receive the consent of the community, as valid legal
expressions of the community’s own
convictions as to what is just or unjust, good or evil. In the absence of
this consent, law either withers away
or becomes tyrannical.
Accordingly, for the law truly to
serve the common good, some level
of consensus as to the goodness of
the law is essential. And, in the face of
widespread moral disagreement on an
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issue, the public conscience may need
to be clarified through nonlegal educative efforts in an atmosphere of reasoned dialogue and factual argument
before the law can effectively promote
the common good. In the absence of a
basic moral consensus, any attempt to
change the law will be unenforceable,
ineffective, and resented as unduly
restrictive of freedom.
Murray’s thought helps us to recognize that efforts to translate moral
principles directly into legal prohibitions may sometimes damage the
common good. An official who fully
accepts the Church’s teaching on abortion as a grave moral evil still must
make a judgment in conscience as to
how the law can most effectively deal
with that particular evil within the
wider context of concern for the
common good. What sort of politicallegal response will actually reduce
the number of abortions in the United
States in the face of current constitutional and social realities?
In evaluating whether or not a public official’s policy positions are consistent with a desire to protect life, we

need to pursue an inquiry that considers abortion within the context of a
wider range of legal-political questions.
Other areas of the law can and must
contribute to nurturing the virtues
necessary to supporting a culture of life.
What sort of a society are we
becoming through the entire range of
legal policies we advocate and enact?
Who are we becoming as a society
when we regularly invoke the death
penalty? What sort of a society do we
become if we overzealously restrict
civil liberties in response to terrorism,
or if our immigration law and border
control policies undervalue the dignity
of the lives of immigrants? Have we
listened to the voices of women who
have felt compelled to make the choice
for abortion, and are we working to
establish a set of social policies that
might provide women with the support
needed to make the decision to carry
their babies to term? In short, are we
working to build a legal system that
as a whole supports and promotes the
virtues necessary to protect human
dignity and sustain a culture of life?
John Courtney Murray’s work

reflected his deep concern to promote
genuine dialogue at the heart of common life in a pluralistic society—a genuine dialogue often sadly lacking in
contemporary public life. If the public
discourse leading to the enactment of a
law fails to include genuine attempts to
help people understand why the moral
vision underlying the law promotes the
common good, a disjunction will continue to exist between law and morality.
As a result, the style of public discourse about law is crucial. A proposed
law’s moral rationale must be communicated in ways that people can accept
and understand. One’s partners in dialogue must be treated with respect. In
order to promote greater clarity in the
public conscience, the Church must
engage Catholic public officials and
American society more generally in a
genuine conversation about how best
to promote the common good. For
that conversation to be effective, the
participants cannot be locked in positions of immovable dogmatic certitude. Instead, the conversation must
go forward in a spirit of shared pursuit
of the truth, fostering a genuine dialogue of mutual listening and speaking,

where all sides are willing to learn as
well as teach.
What does it mean to be an American Catholic in public life in today’s
pluralistic, democratic society? It
means one is called to moral integrity
and undivided conscience; to be a person striving to base his or her political
views “on his or her particular understanding of the human person and the
common good.” It is to be a person
engaged in the “subtle discipline” of
trying to build a social, political, and
legal order that reflects the imperatives
of the moral order, without confusing
law and morality. And in the midst of
pluralism and deep moral disagreement, it is to be a member of a church
willing to engage in the nuanced reflection and genuine dialogue that are
essential if we are to form hearts and
minds committed to a culture of life.
Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J., is an Assistant
Professor at the Boston College Law School.
Reprinted with permission of the author from
America, August 2, 2004.

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